
Class _ 



i /''. A 



Copyright N^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Hereafter and Heaven 



THE HEREAFTER 
AND HEAVEN 



LEVI GILBERT 

Author of " Visions of the Christ," 

"Incense," "Sidelights on 

Immorality," etc. 




CINCINNATI : JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



UBEARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Recelvec? 

MAR n 1907 

A_ Copyright Entry 
GLASS A XXc, No, 



Copyright, 1907, by 
Jennings & Graham 



xiV* 



^thxtntxan 



SI0 all mlj0 Biiuvt tl|^ "O5l0ri0U0 ^ttpt*' 
nvin utttutpat^ mitlj txttthin^ fog tlji? 0%r 
imrilmg-plari^s in % Iinusi? nf % 3Ta%r*0 

for ^iB hxBtxftltB; t0 all mtj0 ar^ r0tt0rt0«0 
0f % m0rbittg mitljtn tijrm 0f ** tl|^ p0m^r0 
0f tlj? ag^ I0 tttmt,** unh ar^ amar^ 0f tifi? b^- 
5ttttting0 in ti^tm xxf Ilf^ Itfo rt^rnal in tiftiv 
bn0ml^J>g^ 0f ^txh ait& 0f 3^000 Gll|n0t 
mli0m ^t Ifattj 0j?ttt; 10 all mlj0 htBivt a brt- 
t^r r0U0trg, t0lj0 100k for tlj^ rttg mlftrlf Ifatlj 
tlj]^ founiiatt0n0, mtf0 r0ttfe00 tl|at tl|^g ar^ 
0trang^r0 unh pttgrim0 00 tl|^ rartlf, wxh 
grM tlj^ pr0mt0]?0 fr0m afar; I0 all mlj0 ar^ 
&atlg trging t0 figljt % g00ii figljt, 10 MiBlii 
tlfrtr wnvBt, tn k^tp tt|^ fatttj, an& for mlf0m 
i0 latin ttp tlfie rr0mtt ttf rtglftMU0«f 00 ; tn all 
mlj0 lab0r anft ar^ tj^a^g laJn^n— mlj0 gr0att, 
bnng buri^n^Jn — but ml|0 ar^ a00ttr^& tlfat 
5 



Dedication 

mtjat fe mtittul 0lfaU bt ^mnllttm^h up of life 
— ^tlfut ttj^tr liglft affltrtwtt, tulftrlj ta for tlj^ 
mcm^ttt, fe mnrking for ttj:em morie an& mnr^ 
exr^jf&mglg an rt^rnal m:etgljt nf gforg; ta 
all mlf0 ar^ b^r^^au^ii anii Bnrrnmtttg, but ml|0 
ar^ p^rauaiK^Ji ttjat all tlfat ar^ in tlj^ tomba 
aljall ifmr %m untr^ an& aljall ttxvx^ fortlf, 
atiintljat **2l0tt^ratt n^u:erfo0]e tta nmnr ta 
all tlj^ ag^Jn tutja ar^ n^armg ttj]^ bnutib of 
Ufo, mlji^r^ tlj^g lag tlfrtr bur&ws htm\x% ta 
all mtjo g^arn ani prag for ttf^ ttmi^ \xA\txx 
i^atlf atjall b^ nn vxixxt^ — ttntlj:er mourtttng, 
nor rrgtttg, nnr pain ang mnri^; ta all m\\n 
Ijau^ b:rw ratsieh mitlj QIIjrtBt, anjK ar^ mt)^- 
tng tlf^ tljtttga ttjat ar^ abnu^, mljrr^ ffltfrtat 
i0, aratab on llj^ rigljt tjani rxt CS0J1 ; ta all 
mlj0 rnttfib^tttlg b^lfeu^ tljat 

**(5Iy^ morttutg aljaU awak^tt. 

3Jtt fxxihxtm 0f Iftja grarie, 
Knh W0rfll|ip fane ta fv^tt** 



CONTENTS 



Chapter 


Page 


I. 


The Faith of the Ages, - 


9 


II. 


"Risen Indeed!" 


39 


III. 


"With You Alway," 


• 60 


IV. 


"Not Born to Die," - 


80 


V. 


Waiting for the Oarsman, 


97 


VI. 


"The Unforgotten Faces," 


121 


VII. 


The Communion of Saints, 


■ 134 


VIII. 


"For the Faithful De- 






parted," ... 


146 


IX. 


Heaven : Here and Beyond, ■ 


- 161 




Invocation, 


187 



CHAPTER I 
The Faith of the Ages 

In our youth we take life for granted. 
We reflect little, if at all, upon its signifi- 
cance and ultimate conclusions. We are 
happy in the mere fact of living, absorbed 
in the details of each day. But there are 
few men of intelligence and thoughtfulness 
who do not awake, at some time, to the 
wonder and mystery of existence, and be- 
gin to ponder and speculate upon the mean- 
ing of it all. We are driven in upon our- 
selves and the old, old questions which 
have perplexed man from the beginning 
weigh heavily upon our minds. We begin 
to ask over and over: Who am I? What 
am I? Whence came I? Whither am I 
going? Who are these around me — men 
9 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

like myself — mortals or immortals? What 
does all this earth-life signify, and in what 
will it end? What is that strange thing 
we call death? Does life go on forever, or 
does it end with the six feet of earth? Is 
there a Beyond and an infinite and eternal 
life? What value is to be assigned this 
mystical but strong testimony of my inner 
consciousness that I am not one in destiny 
with the beasts, but have my origin, nature, 
and issue intimately involved in the being 
of an Ever-living One who stands to me 
as Creator, Father, and Savior? 

We say that that man must be singularly 
careless and unreflecting upon whom some 
such meditations and persistent queries do 
not at times press. They come upon us 
frequently while we walk the streets in the 
midst of the hurrying throngs. They brood 
over our souls as we look up into the sky, 
as we listen to the voices of earth and 
winds and stars. They are started by the 

lO 



The Faith of the Ages 

miracles of growth in tree and flower and 
grass-blade in the spring-time. They in- 
vade our inmost thoughts as the accents of 
the preacher fall upon our ears. They 
compel our attention in the solemn stillness 
of the night before sleep overtakes us. 
They visit us on our beds of illness, and 
alike introduce themselves suddenly and 
uninvited in our hours of merriment and 
freest unconcern. The enigma of the uni- 
verse — ^how all these things, we included, 
came to be? — why there is something in- 
stead of nothing? — whether it is everlast- 
ing or not? — whether what we call matter 
and spirit are separate essences? — when 
was the beginning and what was the method 
of creation, and how will it all wind up? — 
who and what and where is God? — what 
is the soul, if there be a soul, what its 
proper life and what its prospects for the 
future? — these are the world-old questions 
that keep propounding themselves while we 
II 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

can not refuse a hearing, and demand that 
we shall try to formulate some answer. 

In one of his earliest and now suppressed 
poems, Tennyson expresses these everlast- 
ing interrogations : 

"Whether we wake or whether we sleep? 
Whether we sleep or whether we die? 
How you are you? Why I am I? 
Who will riddle me the how and why? 
The world is somewhat; it goes on somehow; 
But what is the meaning of then and now? 
I feel there is something; but how and what? 
I know there is somewhat; but what and why? 
I can not tell if that somewhat be I." 

It is only in the light of immortality that 
any satisfactory answers can be given to 
these insistent questionings. If man be in- 
deed only dust of the ground, if the grave 
swallows him up forever, then there is no 
solution to the mysteries of life, time, earth, 
the universe. Only by postulating an ex- 
istence beyond the tomb and limitless in 
duration and capacity, can any adequate 

12 



The Faith of the Ages 

meaning be at all discerned in the creation 
of such a being as man with all his hopes, 
yearnings, mental, moral, and spiritual 
powers. But there is a satisfactory answer 
which comes out of the riven and empty 
tomb of Christ. We hear the voice which 
says, "Because I live ye shall live also,'' 
and we are comforted. We may not be 
able to solve all the deep problems which 
burden us with their seeming inscrutability ; 
but, given eternity, we can be content to 
wait and wonder in expectation of the 
larger and clearer light. And our human 
lives which, on the supposition of death 
being an endless sleep, become so incapable 
of explanation, comprehension, or rational 
j ustification — so fragmentary, unsatisfac- 
tory, unmeaning, mocking, "a tale told by 
an idiot," — on the basis of faith in the 
Easter message, in the argument of the de- 
serted sepulcher in the garden, in the words 
of Him who said, ''I was dead, and, behold, 

13 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

I am alive for evermore/' become pro- 
foundly meaningful, reasonable, self-justi- 
fying, and worthy of themselves and of the 
God in whom they have their underlying 
being. Only upon the assumption of 
heaven, everlasting life, a spiritual exist- 
ence in companionship with Christ in Para- 
dise throughout the eternities, can we find 
any clue to the labyrinth, any key that will 
unlock the inner wards of the mysteries. 
They alone give meaning to man and life. 
If we grow skeptical and unbelieving as 
to these fundamental verities of the Chris- 
tian revelation, and at last close our mind 
to them and sit in the darkness of negation, 
what shall it profit us? William Dean 
Howells has put this unanswerable ques- 
tion into lines of rarest grace: 

'If I lay waste and wither up with doubt, 

The blessed fields of heaven where once my 

faith 
Possessed itself serenely safe from death; 
If I deny the things past finding out; 



The Faith of the Ages 

Or if I orphan my own soul of One 
That seemed a Father, and make void the 

place 
Within me where He dwelt in power and 
grace, 
What do I gain by that I have undone?'* 

Dr. William Osier, Regius professor of 
medicine in Oxford University, has ex- 
pressed the thought that the majority of 
men have consciously thrust the thought 
of the future life out of their lives. We 
must dissent from this view, judging from 
our own experience, and agree with an- 
other, who says: "That the thought of the 
after-life is not spoken of does not by any 
means argue indifference, and there are 
many things that indicate that that thought 
is still a mighty force in the lives of the 
great multitude." Dr. Osier takes his stand 
with those who instinctively believe in im- 
mortality even in the absence of scientific 
demonstration, rather than with the materi- 
alists who think they can ''prove" their po- 
15 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

sition experimentally. He praises the 
humble and saintly believers "who have 
preserved in the past and still keep for us 
to-day the faith that looks through death." 

A Unitarian writer, commenting on Dr. 
Osier's position, says: "We are not in the 
least troubled by the assertion that there 
is no scientific proof of the doctrine of im- 
mortality, because the statement must be 
made in the same sense in which it will be 
asserted that we have no scientific proof of 
the existence of God. But he who is cer- 
tain of immortality as any one is or can be 
of the existence of God will not miss the 
scientific certainty which Dr. Osier says 
does not exist." 

Science did not make the belief in im- 
mortality and heaven, and it can not un- 
make it. The unquenchable hopes, which 
have been the support and inspiration of 
the race, rise instinctively in the heart of 
man and constitute a veritable revelation 
i6 



The Faith of the Ages 

from the God who has created him with 
longings not to be mocked. These primal 
and unaging truths — coming to us from 
remote antiquities and renewed in freshness 
day by day — are not affected by any mod- 
ern advances in the arts of civilization. 

It is frequently asked, in a tone of un- 
answerable triumph, by certain agnostics 
and rationalists, of whom the late Mr. In- 
gersoll was a type, why, in this age of rapid 
progress, we twentieth century advanced 
mortals should hark back some three or 
four thousand years and take our religious 
ideas and inspiration from the people who 
lived in those unscientific ages before Co- 
pernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or 
Spencer — before modern universities, news- 
papers, democracies, railways, steam and 
electric power, telegraphs, telephones, and 
all the rest. But this challenge ignores the 
fact that our inner human life — the prob- 
lems of man, the mind, the soul, the hopes 

2 17 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

and fears, the joys and sorrows, the strug- 
gles and aspirations of the race — have very 
small connection with the movements of 
the physical universe, the law of gravita- 
tion, the hypothesis of evolution, theories 
of government, discoveries in the realm of 
nature, or our mechanical inventions. 

The grandeur of Job is not affected by 
the fact that the man of Uz never inspected 
a skyscraper or rode in an automobile. 
Homer never submitted the Iliad in type- 
written pages to a publisher, and Vergil 
never saw his ^neid set up on a linotype 
machine; but, for all that, they sway the 
centuries intellectually. We read Plato to- 
day and learn from Socrates, and do not 
stop to discount their immortal reasonings 
by reflecting that neither of them ever trav- 
eled a mile a minute on a "limited,'' or sent 
a message from Athens to Thebes by ''wire- 
less." Dante never crossed the ocean in a 
five-day-trip "greyhound." Shakespeare 
i8 



The Faith of the Ages 

never saw the streets of London or Strat- 
ford illuminated with arc lights. Milton 
never talked over the "long distance/' 
Even Goethe, and, more lately, Tennyson, 
were never acquainted with the mysteries 
of radium. What shall it matter to us, 
therefore, if Moses, David, Isaiah, St. Luke, 
St. John, St. Paul, never looked through a 
telescope, never circumnavigated the globe, 
never dreamed of X-rays, never trod an 
ironclad, never read a mammoth daily? 
What they have to say to us about God 
and duty and eternal life is not affected 
by these accidentals — nay, more, in their 
less complex and distracted times they may 
have had more leisure than have we hurried 
and harried moderns for meditation over 
the questions of the here and the hereafter. 
Agnes Repplier has given fine expres- 
sion to our thought. She writes: ''There 
are few things more curious in the study 
of literature than the long journey of an 
19 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

isolated thought through century after cen- 
tury of eager, combative, and ever-altering 
existence. The 'secret thinking of human- 
ity' is the link that binds us to the past. 
'AH things,' said Marcus Aurelius, 'are both 
familiar and short-lived;' and we, repeat- 
ing his words half carelessly to-day, forget, 
in their familiarity, the length of years that 
has been accorded them. What remains to 
us now of the world of Epictetus save the 
unchanging sea, and mountain-tops, and 
the thoughts of men? Yet if the poor 
slave had spoken yesterday, the sound of 
his voice could be no clearer than are its 
undying echoes, the message he gives could 
be no more personal or insistent. We need 
be neither stoics nor philosophers of milder 
sort to give him heed. We take no back- 
ward step, we lessen no inch of the distance 
that has been trodden so painfully since 
his share of pain was over. We only listen 
to his words, and know that years make no 
20 



The Faith of the Ages 

barrier between the souls of men, and that, 
while all else changes, wisdom, gently 
spoken, can never change nor lose its spir- 
itual significance." 

It is over a half-century since Charles 
Kingsley wrote "Yeast," but his message 
to prevent the faith of the fathers crum- 
bling away ''beneath the combined influ- 
ence of new truths which are fancied to be 
incompatible with it, and new mistakes as 
to its real essence" — his belief "that the 
ancient Creed, the eternal Gospel, will stand, 
and conquer, and prove its might in this 
age as it has in every other" — ^his protest 
against "sheer materialism," "an unchris- 
tian and unphilosophic spiritualism," "epi- 
curism, the worst evil of the three" — his 
alarm since men seemed "to be losing most 
fearfully and rapidly the living spirit of 
Christianity," and "sinking out of real liv- 
ing belief, into that dead self-deceiving be- 

21 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

lief-in-believing" — these sound their warn- 
ings for us in our own era as well as in his. 
The years have accumulated since Emer- 
son wrote his deep-thoughted essays, but it 
is difficult to imagine a time when men will 
not delight in their profound truths. And 
he himself corroborates what we are striv- 
ing too imperfectly to say. In ''The Over- 
Soul/' he writes: ''See how the deep, Di- 
vine thought reduces centuries, and millen- 
niums, and makes itself present through all 
ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effect- 
ive now than it was when first His mouth 
was opened? . . . Before the revelations of 
the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink 
away. . . . She has no dates, nor rites, nor 
persons, nor specialties, nor men. . . . 
With each Divine impulse the mind rends 
the thin rind of the visible and infinite, and 
comes out into eternity, and inspires and 
expires its air. It converses with truths 
that have always been spoken in the world, 

22 



The Faith of the Ages 

and becomes conscious of a closer sym- 
pathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with per- 
sons in the house/' 

Is not this a basis reasonable enough for 
treasuring the unaltering, undying truths 
of our Scriptures when they speak to us 
of God, the imperishable soul, immortality 
and heaven? We need not deny the worth 
of the best thinking of to-day. We need 
not, in its largest sense, confine inspiration 
to a remote antiquity — the God of Jacob 
is our refuge, too, and for us, as for the 
olden time, ''there is a spirit in men, and 
the breath of the Almighty giveth them 
understanding." But the men of the past 
and the men of the present are bound to- 
gether indissolubly by the possession of the 
same inspiring, perennial, unaging truths 
about the secret soul-life within them and 
us and all humanity, and the incalculable 
destinies which, for every child of God, 
lie beyond the verge of this short time- 
23 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

period on earth, across the hills in the land 
unseen but infinitely more real than this 
realm o£ shadows. 

St. Peter speaks of an inheritance "in- 
corruptible, undefiled, and amaranthine," 
or, as it is translated, "that fadeth not 
away/' The allusion is to the mythical 
amaranth flower that was fabled to be fade- 
less. We are told by many that Christian- 
ity is obsolete, moribund; that the age has 
outgrown its swaddling-clothes. As men 
no longer float in rude dug-outs, but sail 
in palatial steamers; as they no longer 
journey on the donkey's back, but travel 
by lightning-express, so the religion which 
might have been good enough for the an- 
cient and musty Hebrews thousands of 
years ago, ought by this time to be re- 
placed by something more modern. But 
if religion be primarily an affair of the 
heart, and not a belief of the head ; if faith 
be an unalterable disposition of the soul, 
24 



The Faith of the Ages 

this whole subject may seem different. Joy 
is the same to-day as it was with Miriam. 
Affection has not altered since Jacob kissed 
Rachel. Grief has not changed since David 
cried, "O, Absalom, my son!" or since Job 
moaned, "My soul is weary of my Hfe!" 
Faith, Hope, and Love were the same in 
Abraham and Isaac as in us, and it is on 
these fundamental activities of the human 
heart that Christianity with its revelation 
that death does not end all, but that life is 
continuous and cumulative, is based. 

Professor Masson says: "We read the 
old poets now, the old historians, the old 
moralists, with no acquired sense that they 
or their themes or their teachings are ap- 
preciably removed from us because they 
lived before Copernicus. What does it mat- 
ter in respect to the power over our hearts 
and spirits as we read what astronomical 
system we may fancy we detect in the Book 
of Job?'' The Hebrews of four thousand 
25 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

years ago were indeed a simple-minded peo- 
ple, but they told not what they knew scien- 
tifically, but what they felt. 

"Consider," says Ruskin, "how we regard 
a schoolboy, fresh from his term's labor. 
If he begins to display his newly acquired 
small knowledge, how soon do we silence 
him with contempt; but it is not so if the 
schoolboy begins to feel or see anything. 
In the strivings of his soul within him he 
is our equal ; in his power of sight and 
thought he stands separate from us, and 
may be a greater than we. We are ready 
to hear him forthwith: 'You saw that? 
You felt that? No matter for your being 
a child; let us hear.' Consider that every 
generation of men stands in this relation to 
its successor. It is as the schoolboy: the 
knowledge of which it is the proudest will 
be as the alphabet to those who follow. It 
had better make no noise about its knowl- 
edge ; a time will come when its utmost, in 
26 



The Faith of the Ages 

that kind, will be food for scorn. 'Poor 
fools! was that all they knew? and behold 
how proud they were!' But that we see 
and feel will never be mocked at. 'In- 
deed/ they will say, 'they felt that in their 
day? saw that? Would God we may be 
like them before we go to the home where 
sight and thought are not.' " 

And George Eliot writes likewise: "The 
great river-courses which have shaped the 
lives of men have hardly changed; and 
those other streams, the life-currents that 
ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to 
the same great needs, the same great loves 
and terrors." 

And since Christianity is based upon 
these needs and loves, and furnishes a suffi- 
cient answer to them all, until life and 
death, joy and sorrow, earth and heaven, 
man and God are explained away, it must 
remain the ultimate and final religion. An- 
cient as humanity, it will survive till the 
27 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

heavens wax old as a garment and are 
folded as a scroll. The function and power 
of the preacher who lifts up before the 
vision of wearied and dying men the glori- 
ous hopes of blissful and never-ending life 
at God's right hand, will never pass away. 
"While man sins and suffers, while there 
is blood-tinged sweat upon his brow, while 
there is weeping in his home and anguish 
in his heart, that voice can never lose its 
music which brings forth the comfort and 
inspiration of the gospel; which tells the 
sin-tormented spirit the tale of the Infinite 
Pity, and bids it lay its sobbing wretched- 
ness to rest on the bosom of Infinite Love." 
Richard Henry Dana gives utterance to 
this ingrained faith of man through the cen- 
turies in such ringing lines as these: 

"O, listen, man! 
A voice within us speaks the startling word, 
*Man, thou shalt never die!' Celestial voices 
Hymn it around our souls: according harps, 
By angel fingers touched when the mild stars 

28 



The Faith of the Ages 

Of morning sang together, sound forth still 
The song of our great immortality: 
Thick clustering orbs, and this our fair domain. 
The tall, dark mountains, and the deep-toned 

seas 
Join in this solemn, universal song." 

This belief in immortality and heaven 
assumes, we are compelled to believe, too 
sober, if not an almost depressed, aspect in 
our minds. We are not thrilled by the 
great message as we should be. We do not 
often enough "greet the unseen with a 
cheer.'' We associate too much our 
thoughts of heaven with the pains of sick- 
ness and death, the natural pangs of part- 
ing with our loved ones, the darkness and 
coldness of the grave. If we do not con- 
sciously put the two sets of images to- 
gether, we frequently allow the earth-side 
of the parting of soul and body to make 
a forbidding background for the brighter 
joys of heaven. And even when we put 
the two views into contrast — ^the mourning 
29 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

of earth and the ecstasy of heaven-— we do 
not always reaUze the rapture that should 
be our portion. We do not forget the ex- 
ultant hymns of the Church as Christians 
look forward to their heavenly rest. But 
we do not allow these exultant sentiments 
and strains to enter into our lives and affect 
them as they should and might. If we 
would but open wide our natures to the in- 
fluences from the unseen, to the inspirations 
from the infinite and eternal, and endeavor 
to experience the reality of all the glorious 
prospects, what lofty joys might indeed be 
ours! 

For our chief joys must forever lie, not 
in the abundance of things that we possess, 
but in the unquenchable hopes and loves of 
the soul. Epictetus represents Socrates as 
speaking: ''O men, whither are ye borne 
away ? What do ye ? Miserable as ye are ! 
Like the blind men, ye wander up and 
down. Ye have left the true road, and are 
30 



The Faith of the Ages 

going by a false. Ye are seeking peace and 
happiness where they are not, and if an- 
other show you where they are, ye beheve 
him not. Wherefore will ye seek it in out- 
ward things ? In the hodyf It is not there ; 
and if ye beheve me not, lo, Myro! lo, 
Ophellius ! In possessions? It is not there ; 
and if ye believe me not, lo, Croesus ! lo, the 
wealthy of our day, how full of mourning 
is their life! In authority? It is not there, 
else should those be happy who have been 
twice or thrice consul; yet they are not. 
Whom shall we believe in this matter? 
You, who look but on these men from with- 
out, and are dazzled by the appearance, or 
the men themselves? And what say they? 
Hearken to them when they groan, when 
by reason of those consulships and their 
glory and renown, they hold their state the 
more full of misery and danger! In roy- 
alty? It is not there ; else were Nero happy, 
and Sardanapalus !" 

31 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

He also represents Diogenes, the Cynic, 
as saying : *^And how is it possible that one 
can live prosperously who hath nothing — 
a naked, homeless, hearthless, beggarly man, 
without servants, without a country? Lo, 
God hath sent you a man to show you in 
very deed that it is possible. Behold me, 
that I have neither country, nor house, nor 
possessions, nor servants ; I sleep on the 
ground; nor is a wife mine, nor children, 
nor domicile, but only earth and heaven, 
and a single cloak. And what is lacking 
to me? Do I ever grieve? Do I fear? 
Am I not free? When did I blame God 
or man? When did any of you ever see 
me of a sullen countenance?" 

These old philosophers were right, and 
their words are quite as applicable to-day 
as they were in their remote age. All men 
desire happiness, and are discontented if 
they do not find it. God intended they 
should have it. His universe ministers to 
.32 



The Faith of the Ages 

it. Heaven and happiness are inevitably 
associated. While it is true that holiness 
is a higher aim than happiness, duty more 
imperative than pleasure; while it is true 
that neither the epicurean nor the utilitarian 
theories can furnish a basis for morals, we 
still believe that joy is a necessary and in- 
variable attendant of the loftiest ideals and 
performances. It is the obligation as well 
as the privilege of all men both to seek 
happiness and to make their contributions 
of it to the world. 

We falsely imagine that the sources of 
joy are far to seek. Of the commandment 
of the Lord, it was said that it was not 
^'far off;'' "It is not in heaven, that thou 
shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to 
heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us 
to hear it, that we may do it? Neither is 
it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, 
Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring 
it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we 
3 33 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

may do it? But the Word is very nigh 
unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, 
that thou mayest do it/' In Hke manner, 
joy is never remote, but always near at 
hand. 

We think that if we possessed great 
wealth we would get happiness; but "a 
man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
of the things he possesseth." Ecclesiastes, 
the preacher, has a good deal to say on 
that subject. We think by travel to find it, 
but return as disappointed as King Arthur's 
knights from their quest of the Holy Grail. 
Jesus and his Galilean band and St. Francis 
of Assisi show how men may be happy on 
little. Burns sang with a true note : 

"It's no in titles nor in rank; 
It 's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, 

To purchase peace and rest. 
It 's no in makin' muckle mair ; 
It's no in books, it's no in lear. 

To make us truly blest. 

34 



The Faith of the Ages 

If happiness hae not her seat 

And center in the breast, 
We may be wise, or rich, or great. 

But never can be blest 
Nae treasures, nor pleasures, 

Could make us happy lang; 
The heart ay's the part ay 

That makes us right or wrang." 

It is those things that belong exclusively 
to nobody, and are for everybody, that hold 
the secret of joy: to be alive — to see, hear, 
feel, smell, taste — to use the mind — ^to be 
human and know one's self a child of God ; 
to cultivate manliness and womanliness, to 
have a steady and limitless flow of sym- 
pathy; to rejoice in one's youth, to be the 
ruler and not the slave of one's powers, to 
realize individuality, personality, to experi- 
ence the delight of struggle, the bitter-sweet 
in suffering, the heroic mind in persecution, 
the victory in death — these will bring truest 
joy. 

To love Nature and commune with her 
35 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

in healthy outdoor life; to breathe the air, 
to have an appreciative eye for the glory 
of sun, moon, flying clouds, mountain, sea, 
flower, and forest; to look out into space 
and up into the midnight sky; to exercise 
in all simple, healthful recreations — these 
will furnish the real satisfactions. 

To have the love-light of home, to meet 
about the table, to engage in cheerful talk ; 
to know the love of father and mother, wife, 
children, brothers, and sisters ; to possess 
true friends and give friendship, to mingle 
in elevating and pure society, to have com- 
panionship with the best — these will foster 
abiding enjoyments. 

To revel in thought, to sit pensively in 
memory, to converse on high themes, to 
wander through choicest literature, to listen 
to poetry and music, to gaze on painting 
or marble — these have in them sweetest de- 
lights. 

36 



The Faith of the Ages 

To give one's self to his daily labor, to 
serve the needy, to glow with pride because 
of citizenship in a great country, to be 
moved by a mighty past and go forward 
with a mightier present and future — these 
will constitute the loftiest pleasures. 

To be a sincere Christian and have the 
benediction of a pure life ; to be in touch 
with the spirits of all the good; to hear 
the Master say, "My joy give I unto you;" 
to be conscious of redemption, to thrill at 
the spreading of God's kingdom, the salva- 
tion of humanity, and the glorious prospect 
of a regenerated earth; to be sensitive to 
the powers of the age to come — the uplift- 
ing thoughts of eternity and immortality— 
th^se contain the secret of a noble rapture. 

So let us sing our Jubilate. "For this 
corruptible must put on incorruption, and 
this mortal must put on immortality," and 
"Death is swallowed up in victory" 
37 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

''Sing to thyself, O heart, my heart ! 

Through light and shade as the days go on, 
What though the glory of dawn depart? 
Stars arise with the waning sun/ 

Sing to thyself, as the bird on the bough 
Rocks, and is trustful with perfect faith, 

'There 's much of blessing and sweetness now, 
And the future is His — as His message 
saith/" 



38 



CHAPTER II 
"Risen Indeed!" 

A Ri:cENT writer on immortality has de- 
clared it to be a mistake to stake the whole 
question of a future life upon the corporeal 
resurrection of Christ. He says: /'When 
one hears modern rationalistic thought re- 
jecting that resurrection on the ground of 
insufficiency and unreliability of testimony 
for such a stupendous event, he feels all 
hope of his personal immortality trembles 
with this one discussion of the historic ac- 
curacy of an occurrence said to have trans- 
pired nineteen centuries ago; whereas all 
Christ's resurrection does is to bring im- 
mortality to light, not to create it. 'Man is 
not immortal because Christ rose, but Christ 
rose because man is immortal.' If He did 

39 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

not rise, man is immortal just the same, 
providing it is the souFs nature, as immor- 
taHty depends on the nature of God's cre- 
ation and will." 

We are unable to see, however, any par- 
ticular need for such reflections. Other 
arguments may come out of science and 
philosophy to the support of the faith cre- 
ated by Christ's resurrection, but that tre- 
mendous fact still remains the Gibraltar 
of the Christian's faith in the future. De- 
spite all the elaborate and ingenious efforts 
of rationalists to discredit its historical char- 
acter, it still stands. Man might not cease 
to hope for immortality were Christ's resur- 
rection plainly disproved. He did so hope 
before Christ came. But the great ground 
of his present confidence and believing 
trust would be removed. But there is ab- 
solutely no need of our looking around for 
coverts and refuges on the supposition that 
our faith of to-day may perhaps be torn 
40 



^^Risen Indeed!" 

away from us. In the minds of all sober- 
minded scholars there is no such even re- 
mote probability. President Harper was 
set down by some as among the "advanced'' 
Biblical critics. And yet he conclusively 
showed that interpretation of the New Tes- 
tament must never disconnect itself from 
the facts upon which the narrative is based. 
It must not run into pure subjective recon- 
struction of the evangelist's story, based 
on nothing but guesses and suppositions. 
*'We may not forget/' says he, ''that, after 
all, the events were the principal thing. 
For example, the suffering and death and 
resurrection of Jesus Christ are history; 
that is, they are facts. Is it not true, then, 
that the historical fact back of the record 
is the thing on which we must build our 
faith, the solid rock on which we may take 
our stand?" 

It is undeniable that to certain scientific 
minds miracles present great difficulties for 
41 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

thought. But nothing is gained by critics 
of the Christian system in trying to dodge 
the evidence for miracles by seeking to ex- 
plain them away in some superficial fashion. 
A recent volume on ''Miracles and Super- 
natural Religion'' seems to us to insult the 
intelligence by suggesting that each case 
of raising from the dead in the Bible might 
be only a resuscitation from a deathlike 
trance. This might possibly have happened 
once in the history of Jesus ; but to assert 
that there was this singular coincidence in 
each of several cases — including that of 
Lazarus — is to violate all the laws of prob- 
ability and to evoke more doubt than it al- 
lays. We are told that Christ meant what 
He said when He said, "Lazarus sleepeth," 
and did not mean what He said when He 
said, 'Xazarus is dead." 

But to refuse to accept the literal resur- 
rection of Jesus ; to admit that ''no halluci- 
nation theory, no gradual rise and growth 
42 



^^Risen Indeed!" 

of hope in the minds of a reflective few," 
can account for the belief in the resurrec- 
tion with its memorials in the Christian 
Church; and then to take refuge in some 
such vague and unsatisfactory generaliza- 
tion as that something happened that first 
Easter morning in Joseph's garden — ^but 
''zvhat occurred; the reality in distinctness 
from any legendary accretions" we may not 
be able to know — this must be regarded as 
truly a *'most lame and impotent conclu- 
sion." Harnack would have us partake of 
the Easter faith while discrediting the 
Easter message; but the two are insepa- 
rable. Others would resolve all the mir- 
acles of healing into something like the 
mind-cures of to-day. Well does Dr. James 
Orr say: ''The presence of One who is a 
moral miracle in history is certainly a seri- 
ous difficulty for a non-miraculous theory 
of the world." ''In no sense can the Chris- 
tianity of Jesus fit in with a theory of the 
43 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

world which excludes miracles; for it is 
itself a miracle — a miracle of grace from 
first to last." "J^sus is represented 
throughout the Gospels as performing 
works of a truly miraculous character: 
healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, rais- 
ing the dead — works which can not be re- 
solved into 'moral therapeutics' without sur- 
rendering the credibility of the entire Gos- 
pel narrative/' 

Therefore we say to the critics of the 
Bible: Face the issue clearly, frankly, and 
positively, and do not try to juggle, raise 
false issues, or fill the air with dust. Flimsy 
rationalizings are certainly not to be pre- 
ferred to an old-fashioned, stalwart belief, 
which at least has the merit of some respect- 
able argument on its side. 

Theologians of the present day sum up 
the effects of Christ's resurrection upon the 
thought of the early time, which has per- 
44 



^^Risen Indeed!" 

petuated itself to our own century. First, 
it assured men of what till then had been 
a hope imperfectly supported by Scriptural 
warrant, and therefore contested by an in- 
fluential school of thought — the Sadducees. 
Second, it raised and enlarged that hope. 
It is probable that the people generally had 
interpreted resurrection as a renewal of 
this present life under its previous condi- 
tions. Christ's resurrection showed that it 
meant entry into an entirely new phase of 
existence. Third, it brought the doctrine 
of resurrection from the background of re- 
ligious thought to the very front. The 
Gospel of Jesus Christ demanded accept- 
ance on the ground of His resurrection. It 
was that which declared Him to be the Son 
of God, and set the final seal of Divine ap- 
proval on His teaching and life. The Gos- 
pel which the apostles preached was the 
Gospel of the resurrection. Confession of 
45 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Jesus as Lord and belief in His resurrec- 
tion, they declared, are the only things nec- 
essary to salvation. 

Paul writes to the Romans concerning 
Jesus Christ, our Lord, that He was *'de- 
clared to be the Son of God with power, 
according to the spirit of holiness, by the 
resurrection from the dead." "Remove the 
resurrection of Christ," says Dr. Marcus 
Dods; "prove it to be unhistorical, the de- 
lusive fancy of the disciples, and the entire 
Christian creed crumbles, and we lose our 
strongest evidence of the supernatural in 
the life of our Lord." He then quotes from 
another: "If it be proved that no living 
Christ ever issued from the tomb of Joseph, 
then that tomb becomes the grave not of 
a man, but of a religion, with all the hopes 
built on it and all the splendid enthusiasms 
it has inspired;" and he continues in these 
words, "If belief in the resurrection is base- 
less, if the body of Jesus rotted away in 
46 



^^Risen Indeed!'' 

the grave like all others, if he was held fast 
in the grim silence of death, then, although 
His ideal life remains, yet materialists may 
urge, with a force that is not easily resisted, 
that material laws are supreme, that Na- 
ture is God, and that beyond the limits Na- 
ture imposes we have no outlook at all." 
Neither will Dr. Dods have anything to 
do with any of the recent or former substi- 
tute theories for the literal resurrection, 
such as Harnack's, that Christ lay in His 
grave, and the elements of His body passed 
into nature as with other men, but that His 
Spirit was not inclosed in the grave, but is 
living; that His teachings and life and His 
dedication even unto death to the interests 
of humanity are what survive. Or the 
older theory that the vision of the risen 
Christ grew out of the overwhelming yearn- 
ing on the part of His disciples for His 
idolized form and the conviction that such 
a soul could not possibly become extinct; 
47 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

or that it arose out of the fervor and ecstasy 
of a Mary Magdalene ; or from a strong im- 
pression, directly and miraculously im- 
printed by God upon the disciples' minds 
that their Master was still alive; or from 
mistaking, in their strained mood, some one 
else in the dim dawn for Him ; or from the 
appearance of some materialization of Him- 
self by Christ from the world of spirits — 
a materialization which could assume mo- 
mentarily the old familiar shape, even as 
modern spiritualists claim the dead have 
shown themselves capable of accomplish- 
ing. 

As Dr. Dods clearly shows, all of .these 
views miss the point. The disciples be- 
lieved, as a matter of course, that Christ 
was alive and that His spirit was in para- 
dise. They needed no persuasion or assur- 
ance that Jesus was immortal. Not one of 
them had any doubt about it. That He ex- 
isted somewhere in the spiritual realm no 

48 



^^Risen Indeed!" 

one of them would have questioned for a 
moment. They demanded no evidence that 
Jesus had shared the lot of all good men, 
and that somewhere in God's universe He 
was alive and happy. 

But it was another problem entirely that 
proposed itself to them : Whether, after all, 
He was the Messiah ? And, if so, how was 
it that He could suffer rejection by the 
authorities and death at their hands? 
''How could the Messiah, the great King 
who was to have all power and authority, 
have been so helpless, and have actually 
been crucified as an impostor?" 

It was this crucial question which was 
answered by the resurrection. That sub- 
lime and awful event was the reversal of 
the judgment of the Sanhedrin, and as such 
was immediately hailed by the disciples. 
In that nullification of death, God owned 
His Son and accepted His sacrifice and set 
Him above all powers. The hope of 
4 49 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Christ's followers, which had been dis- 
mayed and blighted, was suddenly, com- 
pletely, and forever re-established. The 
empty grave, and the Master reappearing 
after manifest death and burial, proclaimed 
Jesus clearly the eternal Christ, the Son 
of God, with power. ''The Messiah must 
not be left under any bondage to the world. 
He must be victorious over man's last 
enemy and must enter on His reign in the 
complete manhood of a perfected body and 
spirit." 

''The rulers congratulated themselves that 
one more crazy delusion had been stamped 
out. And but for the resurrection it would 
have been stamped out. But for this Divine 
reversal of human judgment the disciples 
would not have known what to make of His 
death. The beauty and promise of His 
words, which had so attracted them, would 
now have seemed delusive and unbearable. 
But in the light of the resurrection they 
50 



"Risen Indeed!" 

saw that Christ 'ought to have suffered 
these things and so to enter His glory/ 
It was only in the light of the resurrection 
that the death of Christ becomes intel- 
ligible." 

We must never dissociate the resurrec- 
tion from the Christ of the resurrection. 
It is not a fair test of our belief in the 
greatest miracle of the ages to ask if we 
would believe easily the testimony of wit- 
nesses who might come and tell us that 
some ordinary mortal like ourselves, whom 
we might know died some days since, had 
been seen alive and had been conversed 
with. We have to do with a unique per- 
sonality. He was different from all other 
men. ''No one is likely to believe in the 
resurrection who has not been so impressed 
by the personality presented in the Gospels 
as to be persuaded that somehow life dwells 
in Him for all men." It is not the reported 
rising again of some man, sinful like his 
51 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

fellows, who might be named Indiscrimi- 
nately that is before us. A totally different 
situation confronts us : ''It is the rising 
again of the Christ, of Him who had- 
founded God's Kingdom and been put to 
death because He had claimed to be the 
Representative of God ; it was impossible 
that His earthly career should close with 
His death, that the curtain should fall in 
the darkness of Calvary ; that His followers 
should be left in doubt whether, after all, 
God owned Him as the Christ." And so, 
while the disciples believed in Jesus's Mes- 
siahship because of His resurrection, we are 
helped in accepting the resurrection because 
of His unique, solitary, and Divine person- 
ality and character. 

It is to those who have embraced this 
Christ by faith — who have learned to love 
Him with passion and devotion, and to ap- 
preciate what manner of person He is — that 
the tremendous miracle of the resurrection 
52 



^^Risen Indeed P' 

becomes not a stumbling-block, but a fact 
easily believed and to be joyfully received. 
Those who have experienced in themselves 
the spiritual resurrection through Christ 
have no difficulty with this physical resur- 
rection from Joseph's tomb. As a writer 
in the Hibbert Journal says: ''It was not 
the will of God to force proof of the fact 
of the resurrection upon the minds of un- 
believers, but, on the contrary, only to re- 
veal the risen Savior to those who trusted 
and loved Him before the crucifixion. . . . 
The fact that the history reports only ap- 
pearances of Jesus to His disciples is cer- 
tain ; and it is equally a historical fact that 
in every generation since, only those who 
have sincerely believed in Him as their 
Teacher and Savior have had a genuine 
faith in Him as their risen Lord. . . . The 
real believers have been the men and women 
who loved Him and kept His command- 
ments and attained to spiritual union with 
53 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Him — these have had no doubt that He is 
their Hving Savior ; and we have no reason 
to think that it is the will of God, or the 
natural law of the spiritual life, that any 
others should have the certainty of His 
resurrection. . . . When the human soul 
has accepted the teachings of the Sermon 
on the Mount, has followed the Master to 
Gethsemane and Calvary, has entered into 
the meaning of the crucifixion, and closed 
with it as his own death to sin and rising 
again into the new life of the children of 
God, then the resurrection of the Lord is 
to him the natural and necessary sequence 
of His death. There is no difficulty in be- 
lieving it: on the contrary, it seems to him 
that he could and would believe the resur- 
rection, though there were no historical evi- 
dence for it. The Son of God could not 
be annihilated by the death of His body. 
The Eternal Life which was with the 
Father, and manifested the Father to us, 
54 



^^Risen Indeed!" 

could not possibly be holden in the grasp 
of death." It is in regard to this great 
miracle and mystery, as with all the glori- 
ous truths of the gospel : ''If any man will- 
eth to do His will, he shall know of the 
teaching/' 

Ther^ is no book which has appeared re- 
cently which has attracted much wider or 
more favorable comment than one by a 
prominent Methodist author, William North 
Rice, professor of geology in Wesleyan 
University. His volume on "Christian 
Faith in an Age of Science,'' is most signifi- 
cant as giving the conclusions of an open- 
minded, unfearing, thoroughly competent 
scientist — one who by eminence in his 
chosen department for a third of a century 
has earned the right to speak from the sci- 
entific standpoint with recognized authority 
upon the doctrines and dogmas of our 
Christian faith. The fact that he is him- 
self a Christian can not invalidate what he 
55 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

has to say unless it is admitted that one 
who is a Materialist is similarly invalidated 
in his conclusions on the other side through 
prejudice. 

We wish now to present what this geol- 
ogist has to affirm about the resurrection, 
but must content ourselves with brief ex- 
cerpts from his full and conclusive argu- 
ment. He writes : ''When we consider that, 
but for the faith in the resurrection, Chris- 
tianity would have been buried forever in 
the rock-hewn tomb in which the Master 
lay, and when we try to measure v/hat 
Christianity, with its revelation of Divine 
Fatherhood, and human brotherhood, and 
redemption from sin, and life immortal, has 
been to mankind in these centuries of Chris- 
tendom and Christian civilization, and what 
it promises to be in the glory of a millen- 
nial future, we can not deem it 'a thing 
incredible' that, in that transcendent crisis 
of man's moral history, 'God should raise 
56 



"Risen Indeed!" 

the dead/ ... It is unnecessary to com- 
ment on the air of perfeot simpHcity and 
guilelessness pervading the Gospels. A 
candid reader is continually impressed with 
the conviction that the writers of these 
books fully believed what they wrote. . . . 
There is an air of photographic fidelity 
rather than of artistic selection of details. 
. . . When I think of the alternatives to 
belief in the resurrection, they all seem so 
much more improbable that I find it easier 
to accept the one mystery that explains all 
mysteries. To believe that the faith in the 
resurrection was a delusion, so contradict- 
ing all psychological laws, or a myth which 
was fully developed in a single day, or a 
falsehood perpetrated by the disciples to 
bring upon themselves imprisonment and 
death — ^to believe that the system of relig- 
ious faith which has created a new and 
nobler civilization had its origin in fraud 
or self-deception — taxes credulity more 
57 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

than to believe that Jesus rose from the 
dead." 

Dr. Rice says this in full acknowledg- 
ment of the difficulties which he must feel, 
in common with the thought of the present 
scientific age, in accepting the faith in the 
resurrection. He sees the solemn proces- 
sion forever marching into the ''undiscov- 
ered country'' — he realizes the improbabil- 
ity of an exception to the generalization 
that the dead do not return to life, sus- 
tained by so immense a mass of accordant 
experience, and yet he is absolutely con- 
strained, as an honest man, in view of all 
the facts, to repeat the clause in the creed, 
''On the third day He rose from the dead." 
And what is final and conclusive for him 
will doubtless have similar weight for the 
great majority of thoughtful and candid 
men who admit the difficulties, but confess 
that they can do no other than believe in 
the supreme fact and miracle of all time. 
58 



"Risen Indeed!" 

And this Jesus, who burst the bars of 
death, is our Forerunner who has entered 
into that which is within the veil ; is the 
firstfruits of the great ingathering of hu- 
manity — the specimen sheaf of all the 
sheaves to be garnered in the Eternal 
Store-houses when the Father shall at last 
sound the sweet strain of heaven's Harvest 
Home. 

"O Prince of Life ! I know 
That when I too lie low, 
Thou wilt at last my soul from death awaken; 
And thus I will not shrink 
From the grave's awful brink; 
The heart that trusts in Thee shall ne'er be 
shaken. 

To me the darksome tomb 

Is but a narrow room, 
Where I may rest in peace from sorrow free; 

Thy death shall give me power 

To cry in that dark hour, 
O Death, O Grave, where is your victory?" 



59 



(( 



CHAPTER III 
With You Alway" 



This risen and ascended Jesus is — ac- 
cording to His own promise — Himself with 
us, personally and always — all the days — 
unto the close of the age, the end of the 
world. The Apostles' Creed declares in- 
deed that Christ has ''ascended into heaven 
and sitteth on the right hand of God the 
Father Almighty." But there is danger 
lest our imaginations, uncontrolled by our 
reasons, shall lead us into error when re- 
peating this phrase. It is, perhaps, inevi- 
table for us to think of heaven as the land 
that is 'Very far off,'' as separated from us 
by the distance of the fixed stars; we al- 
60 



"With You Alway" 

ways speak of it as ''up/' although we 
know well that, in infinite space and on a 
round, revolving planet, there can be no 
real distinctions such as up or down. 

If we keep in mind a regal throne, like 
that of an earthly monarch, only more mag- 
nificent as befits the Deity — a celestial pal- 
ace, a train of angelic courtiers — and then 
place Christ on a far-away throne at the 
right hand of such a God, sitting in regal 
majesty, we not only remove Him from us 
in distance and in sympathy and commun- 
ion, but we externalize and materialize the 
entire character and functions both of Him 
and His Father. But if we think of the 
Omnipresent God, everywhere revealing 
Himself — the Immanent Deity resident as 
the Holy Spirit in His worlds and in the 
hearts of His creatures; and if we think 
of His throne as being the center of His 
manifestations to whosoever beholds Him, 
we shall be saved from many an erroneous 
6i 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

view which separates us from Him and 
His Son. 

The right hand of a God of love must 
be, not in some distant sphere where He 
is enshrined in indescribable glories, but 
precisely where He is needed most — down 
amidst the wretchedness of the poverty, 
sin, vice, sorrow, and suffering of His crea- 
tures. If God focalizes Himself anywhere, 
it must be there. It was there that Jesus 
was found when on the earth. His nature 
has not changed. We can not imagine Him, 
when there is any human woe to be alle- 
viated, being content to sit eternally on 
any throne, no matter how glorious, and 
receive through the countless ages the ado- 
ration of saints and angels. Such an ex- 
istence would be as vain as it would be 
insufferable to Him. 

He has infinitely better ways of spend- 
ing His eternities than that. He is the 
62 



"With You Alway" 

Redeemer evermore. His Ascension must 
be interpreted, not in terms of space, but 
in terms of the spirit. If we speak of His 
Second Advent, it must not be on the basis 
of a conception that for twenty centuries 
He has been absent, far removed from a 
world that He is some time going to visit 
again. He has never gone away. He is 
with us now and shall be always and to the 
end of the world. God's glory does not 
consist in any outward glittering pageantry 
and pomp. It is the glory of a love that 
sympathizes and succors and gets down 
close beside His child. That place is the 
right hand of His throne, and there Jesus 
is peculiarly manifested. Even when the 
hymns of the Church, in burning imagery, 
have spoken of "the highest place that 
heaven affords ;'' of the royal diadem that 
"adorns the mighty Victor's brow ;" of "the 
Lamb upon His throne," still they have not 
63 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

lost sight of the great truth we are trying 
to express. They say: 

''From His high throne in bliss He deigns 
Our every prayer to heed; 
Bears with our folly, soothes our pains, 
Supplies our every need." 

But we must not suppose that that ''throne 
in bliss" is a thousand million leagues away, 
and that He emanates His help from afar. 

''The healing of the seamless dress 

Is by our beds of pain; 
We touch Him in life's throng and press, 
And we are whole again.'' 

Certainly this thought of the nearness of 
the Father and the Son ought to be a very 
welcome one to us. The question of what 
God and Christ are to us — a fear or a 
joy, a depression or an inspiration, a con- 
demnation or a reward, a nightmare or a 
beatific vision, a comfort and a rest or a 
disturbance and an annoyance — is obviously 
a very practical one for our religious lives. 

64 



^With You Alway" 

Frequently have we seen in prisons and 
penitentiaries the placard hung up in the 
corridors, "Thou God, Seest Me/' The 
obvious suggestion was that God was 
watching the prisoners like one of the 
turnkeys or guards. He was the Warden 
of a World Prison. He was an Infinite 
Detective, from whose scrutiny none could 
escape. Men might wish to run away from 
His unwelcome oversight, but it was utterly 
impossible. 

To the wicked some such thought of 
the Deity is perhaps inevitable. It repre- 
sents some part of the truth. It has re- 
straining power over evil. Even if God be 
conceived by wrong-doers in no higher 
light than an Almighty Police Judge, It is 
better so than not to be thought of at all. 

Some imperfect Christians sometimes 

appear to think and speak too erroneously 

of their Father. He is to them, seemingly, 

more of a Dread than an Ecstasy — One 

5 63 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

who has put His children on a probation, 
dangerous and difficult, and then watches 
to detect their slips and rate them with 
their errors. To such there is no happi- 
ness, but only torture, in the thought that 
God sees them. 

But the truly good man rejoices in the 
thought that God sees him, that He is coun- 
seling him with His eye upon him. He 
would not have it otherwise. He is glad 
that the eye of the Lord is upon them that 
fear Him, upon them that hope in His 
mercy. He does not look forward to stand- 
ing before Him with fear on any Judgment- 
day. In his joyous anticipations of what 
the Righteous Judge shall do on that day, 
and on all judgment-days, he calls on the 
heavens to be glad, and on the earth to re- 
joice, and the sea and the fields and the 
trees to exult and sing for joy. For God 
shall judge the world with righteousness 
and the people with His truth. 
66 



^With You Alway" 

When the Psalmist speaks of how the 
Lord had searched him and known him, 
understanding his thoughts afar off, win- 
nowing his path, besetting him behind and 
before, and laying his hand upon him ; when 
he asks, — 

"Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" 

is it because he wants to flee from God, or 
because he finds it irksome and disagree- 
able to be forever under the sight of the 
Eternal? Ah, no! But it was his highest 
consolation that, whether in heaven or in 
Sheol, or in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
the right hand of God should lead him and 
hold him. God would not lose him in the 
darkness; for, for Him — blessed fact — the 
night shines as the day. His sweet reas- 
surance it is to say: 

"When I awake, I am still with thee." 

67 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Instead of seeking to evade it, and shrink- 
ing away in sulkiness or terror from the 
gaze of God, he enthusiastically invites it 
and strongly desires it, crying : 

''Search me, O God, and know my heart; 
Try me, and know my thoughts; 
And see if there be any way of wickedness in me, 
And lead me in the way everlasting." 

And this same feeling of peace and rest- 
fulness comes to the devout Christian when 
he is conscious that his Christ is not far 
ofif somewhere, on some outer rim of this 
or some other universe, but close beside 
him in the thick of life with all its strug- 
gles and temptations. 

Particularly is the consciousness of this 
blessed nearness of the Unseen One borne 
in upon us as the mystic influences of 
Nature — ^permeated and saturated with 
the Spirit of God — manifesting an Indwell- 
ing Deity speaking to us in still clearer 
68 



^With You Alway" 

tones in the Incarnate Word — impress us 
on some perfect June day. 

That must be a strangely unsusceptible 
mind that is not singularly touched. Every- 
where overflowing life, everywhere the 
apocalypse of beauty ! Flower and leaf and 
grass-blade, stretches of woods and green- 
sward and quiet waters, fleecy cloud-forms 
and the clear, blue canopy — all invite the 
soul. 

The joy that our spirits have in com- 
munion with nature, at this culmination- 
time of her loveliness, is not, as some would 
have it, a return to barbarism. It repre- 
sents a primary instinct of humanity. Man 
comes again into contact with the most 
ancient founts of inspiration. It is testi- 
mony to the fact that man is natural as 
well as, supernatural in his origin, and 
that the roots of his being strike down 
through the good, brown soil. If God is 
our Father, the Earth is our mother. To 
69 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

be of the earth earthy is not to be base. 
We come from the dust, and to the dust 
shall return; but the dust is not "vile," as 
old theologies affirmed. It, too, is filled 
with the fullness of God, and shows forth 
His presence and power. To own broth- 
erhood to the clod, the tree, the bird, the 
beast, is not to confess ourselves less men, 
but more. Our evolution has carried us up 
until we have taken on the image of God« 
and are made but "little lower" than the 
Eternal. But we carry in us the lineage 
and heritage of our development through 
all the stages of our progress upward, and 
must needs feel intensely a kindly sympathy 
with the universal life of Nature. We have 
one Creator and Father. We, too, are a 
part of the Cosmos. Deep answers unto 
deep — the profundities without us calling 
to the profundities within us. The Soul 
of the world and our souls meet and claim 
kinship. 

70 



^With You Alway" 

The one life of the All-Giver flows and 
throbs in us and all things, and makes a 
fundamental unity. The Oversoul floods 
all existence — all things human, animate, 
inanimate. Indeed, nothing is inanimate. 
God's working and life are everywhere — 
the All-in-all — and we, with all else, are 
included in a common bond of relationship. 
Nature is not given to us mainly for the 
material ends of life, but for her holy min- 
istrations to our highest life. She speaks 
to us with the voice of God. 

There are those who never recognize 
miracle except in so-called infractions or 
reversals of Nature's laws. If the moon 
should stand still, or the sun roll backward 
or be extinguished, they would be aston- 
ished, and point to the evidence of the 
supernatural. But let us have that broader 
faith which sees the Perpetual Miracle all 
about us — in the midnight sky, in every 
sunrise. Wordsworth never rose higher 
71 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

than in those lines composed near Tin- 
tern Abbey: 

"And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

We are convinced that too fev^ Chris- 
tian people get the help they might for 
their spiritual parts from this intimate com- 
munion with nature. Certainly during rare 
October days, when "earth 's crammed with 
heaven and every common bush on fire 
with God;" when the golden-rod is in 
bloom; when the leaves are burning with 
such passionate colors; when the sky out- 
rivals that of Italy in its intense and pellucid 
blueness; when the stars at night and the 
planets shine with a peculiar radiance; 
72 



^With You Always 

when there is a tenderness over the pass- 
ing of summer and a vague premonition of 
the chills of winter ; when the heart is filled 
with thankfulness over the bounty of the 
harvested fields — then, seemingly, the All- 
Father ought to come very near to His 
children through the myriad voices of the 
earth and the worlds. 

To Bryant they came often and often. 
As he watched the flight of the waterfowl, 
while the heavens were glowing with the 
last steps of day, this comforting thought 
took possession of him: 

"He who, from zone to zone, 

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain 
flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone, 

Will lead my steps aright." 

There has been too strong a reaction 

against what used to be called '^natural 

religion." The religion of Christ and the 

Bible and the religion of the Creator and 

73 



. The Hereafter and Heaven 

of nature are not distinct and contrary. 
Evangelical Christianity and the proclama- 
tions of the earth and sky harmonize. Few 
of us will be carried over into Pantheism 
as we sit and brood on an autumn day 
over the mystery in the shimmering light, 
the fleecy clouds, the falling leaves, the sun- 
sets defying the brush of a Rubens or a 
Turner. And are there not other still 
small voices which come at night-time when 
one is listening to the monotonous song of 
the tree-toads and the chirping of the 
crickets? What conceptions of the illim- 
itable, of eternity, of omniscience come 
flooding solemnly yet restfully in upon the 
soul as, for an hour, one may look upon 
the stars and think of the millions of miles 
their light has traveled and speculate on 
what may be in those far-oif spaces of the 
universe ! 

This reverent spirit in the presence of 
nature must be something more than a fad 
74 



"With You Alway" 

or a piece of sentimentality. It must be a 
true worship. And, where the impulse to 
it does not come spontaneously, it must, for 
the good of the soul, be definitely cultivated 
like a love for the reading of the Bible 
itself. 

Nature is our oldest Bible, and the read- 
ing of her sacred truth is too much neg- 
lected by us all in these days of nervous 
overstrain when men have no time for even 
a hurried glance at the marvelous pictures, 
beyond the possibilities of the most famous 
art-galleries of earth, that God is painting 
for them hourly. They do not notice the 
stars once a year, if even so often. It 
might be a distinct gain for our complex 
and feverish age to be taken back for a 
time to shepherd the flocks with Abraham 
and the Bethlehemites, if, thereby, men 
might get a little closer to nature and na- 
ture's God. For some who have dropped 
God out of their lives altogether, in their 
75 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

mad race after material goods, it would 

even be an advantage to be a pagan suckled 

in an outworn creed, if thereby they might 

have glimpses that would make them less 

forlorn — 

"Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

For God did certainly speak to the ear- 
liest men through the days that uttered 
speech to days and the nights that showed 
knowledge to nights. In the most remote 
annals of historic man there is the evidence 
that he was sensible of the presence and 
power of a Creator, Ruler, and Father in 
and through all the wondrous frame of 
things that surrounded him. In the ab- 
sence of an experimental science, which 
demonstrates the unity of the universe, the 
prevalence of the same laws everywhere, 
it was, perhaps, inevitable that humanity 
lost itself in polytheism — in gods many and 
lords many — but underneath even that 
76 



"With You Alway" 

system of idolatry — back of emblems of 
calves, bulls, fish, winged lions — there lay 
the thought of the Mysterious One — ^the in- 
visible Maker whom men in their ignorance 
and sinfulness were reaching out blindly to 
implore. And who can doubt that the All 
Merciful, pitying their lack of knowledge, 
and looking only on their need, interpreted 
their prayers as really meant for Him? 

And we who have such clearer teaching ; 
we who know the immanence, the indwell- 
ing of the Almighty in all of His works; 
we who also understand the transcendence 
of the Infinite One beyond the limits of all 
universes, shall we not feel that we ought 
to bring ourselves into loving and intimate 
converse with this God through the work 
of His fingers? Shall we not acknowledge 
gratefully that there are Holy Scriptures 
written in rock, flower, tree, moon, stars, 
and sunrises, as well as in the pages we 
call the Bible? Let us not forget how that 
77 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Bible itself speaks of the Jehovah who had 
made His name excellent in the earth and 
set His glory in the heavens. Let us read 
again that noble hymn of creation in Gen- 
esis; such nature-Psalms as the 8th, the 
1 8th, and the 104th; the exhortations of 
Amos pleading with men to seek Him who 
''made the Seven Stars and Orion — ^the 
Lord is His name ;" the magnificent de- 
scriptions of the works of the Creator in 
Job and Proverbs. Let us follow rever- 
ently in the footsteps of our scientists, who 
eagerly explore the secrets of nature, read- 
ing therein the mind, thought, and revela- 
tion of their God, and showing a passion 
in the quest like that the Christian has 
when poring over the sacred page. Let 
us remember how Jesus Himself loved the 
lilies, the birds, the sea, the fields, the hills. 
And, taking with us into our communion 
with nature the conception of the love of 
the Father which Jesus has given us, our 
78 



"With You Alway" 

hearts will grow tender with the memory 
of His untold compassion, while they are 
awed by reflecting prayerfully on his in- 
conceivable wisdom and power, and broad- 
ened by thoughts of such vastness of space 
and immensity of time, symbols of His 
greatness. Thus shall we hear with the 
inner ear those earth-whisperings — those 
intimations of Him who is ever by our 
side, and of that Place he went to prepare 
for us, and of that unending life of im- 
m.ortality and bliss in our Inheritance in 
the city that hath foundations. 



79 



CHAPTER IV 
"Not Born to Die" 

"Not only cunning casts in clay: 

Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men, 
At least to me? I would not stay." 

In that matchless Ode on Immortality, 
Wordsworth speaks of the child as 
''haunted forever by the eternal mind," as 
one over whom ''immortality broods like 
the day, a master o'er a slave, a presence 
which is not to be put by." But this is 
true not only for the boy, but for the man 
also. Our inextinguishable hopes possess 
and control us. We needs must recognize 
the imperativeness and divineness of their 
call, and follow where they lead. The 
fundamental intuitions and convictions of 
the soul are our foundation-stones upon 
So 



^^Not Born to Die" 

which to erect the fabric of our lives. They 
issue their unimpeachable warrants for our 
beliefs. We can not deny that which is 
innermost to ourselves. 

That eminent psychologist and philoso- 
pher, Dr. William James, of Harvard, 
speaks of the loquacity with which ration- 
alism may challenge our beliefs for proofs, 
and chop logic, and try to put us down 
with words. ''But,'' he says, ''it will fail 
to convince or convert you, all the same, 
if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its 
conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, 
they come from a deeper level of your 
nature than the loquacious level which ra- 
tionalism inhabits. Your whole subcon- 
scious life, your impulses, your faiths, your 
needs, your divinations, have prepared the 
premises, of which your consciousness now 
feels the result; and something in you 
absolutely knows that the result must 
be truer than any logic-chopping rational- 
6 8i 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

ivStic talk, however clever, that may con- 
tradict it." 

This is admirably said, and will find a 
response in the utterances of the Spirit, 
which are heard in the Holy of Holies of 
our souls. Our dominant and irrepressi- 
ble hopes, which grapple anchor-like with 
that which is behind the veil, are not to be 
read out of court by any petty attorney 
logic. It is in our best hours, our hours 
of vision and inspiration, that we know the 
truth by direct sight. It is then that, in 
the language of Browning, 

"Earth breaks up, time drops away, 
In flows heaven with its new day 
Of endless life.'' 

The Rev. William Chester, in 'Immor- 
tality a Reasonable Faith," has well stated 
the conclusions to which our deep-seated, 
ineradicable convictions must conduct us. 
These are his words: ''Were this life all, 
everything would be so adjusted as to sat- 
82 



'^Not Born to Die" 

isfy the spirit. We would be as contented 
as the cow chewing her cud, or the sheep 
grazing on hillside without a thought or 
care for past or future. . . . What is the 
explanation of those subtle, mysterious 
moods of the spirit that, under deep ex- 
periences of joy or of sorrow, lift us out of 
this world and waft us toward eternity? 
Whence come those true, deep moments of 
the divination of some transcendent world, 
of some Presence above the human, and of 
a reality of contact of the human spirit with 
the Divine? ... If we trust a feeling in 
regard to the reality of the universe and 
build life upon it, why not trust these deep- 
est surgings of the human spirit that bear 
the great flood-tide toward the Infinite?" 

But the doctrine of materialism is no 
more absurd to faith than it is to a pro- 
found and rational philosophy. A late 
writer says: "A famous scientific lecturer, 
being desirous to answer the question, 
83 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

'What is man ?' took his retort, and reduced 
a human body, by chemical analysis, to its 
component parts. He then presented to 
his audience twenty-three pounds of car- 
bon, two pounds of lime, twenty-two ounces 
of phosphorus, about one ounce each of 
sodium, iron, potassium, magnesium, and 
silicon, and apologized for not exhibiting 
some five thousand cubic feet of oxygen, 
and one hundred thousand cubic feet of 
hydrogen, and fifty-two cubic feet of ni- 
trogen." 

We have ourselves seen man thus re- 
duced to his physical elements, put up in 
various jars properly labeled, and displayed 
on shelves of museums. But the thought 
never occurred to us that it was the con- 
tents of these jars that thought, imagined, 
reasoned, loved, sacrificed, prayed, wor- 
shiped, and dreamed of immortality. The 
expression of an ancient writing seemed to 
us to state the case according to the dictum 

84 



'^Not Born to Die" 

of the highest reason : "The dust returneth 
to the earth as it was, and the spirit return- 
eth unto God who gave it." And, if we 
are asked to believe that the body and its 
functions are all of a man, and that there 
is no evidence of an immortal spirit, we 
reply in the terms of the profoundest think- 
ers of our times : Brain and phosphorus are 
only instruments for the expression of 
thought. The soul is the Thinker. The 
soul is the Harper ; it is not the instrument 
nor the music. It is the Player, and makes 
the music. You can have all the chemical 
properties that go to make a man, and you 
can hold these in your hands, and yet not 
have a man. There is a Something More — 
a Plus — a Something which eludes micro- 
scope, scalpel, and test-tubes, but which, 
though intangible and invisible, is yet very 
real. We call it the Soul. It is the Man 
himself. 

85 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

"Myriads of motley molecules through space 
Move round triumphant. By their whirling pace 

Shall we be shaken? All in earth's vast span, 
Our very bodies, veer to other shapes; 
'Mid the mad dance one stubborn power escapes, 

Looks on and marvels, — 't is the soul of man." 

Lord Kelvin, England's foremost man 
of science, contends that science positively 
affirms creative power, and makes every 
one feel a miracle in himself. It is not in 
dead matter, he asserts, that men live, 
move, and have their being, but in a crea- 
tive and directive pov^er, which science 
compels them to accept as an article of be- 
lief. Biologists, he said, w^ere coming once 
more to a firm acceptance of something, and 
that was a vital principle. Agnostics they 
might be in science, but they only knew 
the Creator in his works, and were abso- 
lutely forced by science to admit and to 
believe with absolute confidence in a di- 
rective power. Because biologists could 
not escape from the conclusion that there 
86 



"Not Born to Die" 

was original creative power when they 
studied the physics and dynamics of Hving 
and dead matter, science was not antago- 
nistic to religion, but a help to it. *'A mil- 
lion of millions of millions of years would 
not give them a beautiful world like ours." 
"Forty years ago," said he, "I asked Liebig, 
walking somewhere in the country, if he 
believed that the grass and flowers which 
we saw around us grew by mere chemical 
force. He answered : 'No ! no more than 
I could believe that a book of botany, de- 
scribing them could grow by mere chem- 
ical forces.' Every action of a human free 
will is a miracle to physical and chemical 
and mathematical science." 

Recently we came across an illustration 
used to answer those who asserted that the 
mind of man was so related to his brain 
that when the brain was destroyed in death 
the mind and all thought and conscious 
87 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

existence was destroyed also. The author 
admitted, of course, the close relationship 
of body and spirit, of brain and mind. He 
then said: ''Things may be in one kind of 
relation to each other so that if you take 
away the one you end the other; or they 
may be — equally closely and minutely — re- 
lated to one another with no such conse- 
quence. A couple of illustrations will make 
this plain. Steam is related to, say, a loco- 
motive engine. Take away the engine and 
there is an end to the steam. But why? 
Because of the kind of relation between 
the engine and the steam, because it is a 
causal relationship. But take, say, a ray 
of light in a prism. The refraction and 
colorization of the light are in manifest 
relation to the prism. But take away the 
prism, and do you destroy the light? Cer- 
tainly not. And why not? Because the 
kind of relationship here fs not that of a 
88 



^^Not Bom to Die" 

cause — the prism does not cause the Hght, 
but is rather that of a medium supplying 
opportunit}' for one particular form of its 
manifestation. I hope this is clear, and 
if it is clear,, the application of it will be 
clear, too. The whole question of the pos- 
sibility of the continuance of conscious life 
after the dissolution of the body is simply 
this — is the relationship of matter to mind 
that of a cause, as an engine's is to steam, 
or merely that of a medium, as a prism 
is to light? If it be the former, then phys- 
ical death ends spiritual existence also ; but 
if it be the latter, then physical death ends 
merely one particular form, the bodily, of 
spiritual existence, but that existence itself 
may continue just as light continues to be, 
even though, by the breaking of the prism, 
one particular form of its manifestation is 
destroyed.'' 

There is, in relation to this whole ques- 
89 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

tion of materialism, a question urged by 
Tennyson that still awaits an answer: 

*'Why should we bear with an hour of torture, 

a moment of pain, 
If every man dies forever, if all his griefs are 

in vain; 
And the homeless planet at length will be 

wheeled thro' the silence of space, 
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race, 
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and 

its last brother-worm will have fled 
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the 

rocks of an earth that is dead?'* 

Says Charles Fletcher Dole : ''Can we be- 
lieve that the march of all the generations 
of mankind has been the way of death only ? 
Can we believe that the noblest and holiest, 
the grand men of genius, the leaders and 
helpers of mankind, have perished like so 
many cattle? Then must we translate 
all life into the terms of final death. 
'The Choir Invisible/ and everything 
else, disappears and 'leaves not a wrack 
behind/ The more we contemplate this 
90 



^^Not Born to Die" 

negative interpretation of the universe, 
the more tremendous is the strain on our 
intelHgence. Skepticism becomes at least 
as difficult as faith seemed to be. . . . 
The preposterous will not be suffered to 
happen. We could not respect a God much 
less worship or love any being, who brought 
ranks of creatures into existence, shared the 
mightiest thoughts with them, inspired infi- 
nite hopes in them, lifted the noblest of them 
into rapturous communion with Himself, 
continually unfolded their minds and hearts 
and disclosed the unexhausted capacities of 
their being, only to drop them into noth- 
ingness, as children blow their soap-bubbles 
and drop them out of the window to burst 
and vanish. Is this all that God can do? 
. . . Who could feel the slightest enthu- 
siasm in efforts to crowd the land with 
millions of people, all furnished with model 
houses and a living wage, but believing 
nothing and hoping nothing beyond their 
91 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

brief span of years, more than the com- 
fortable cattle on which they fed? Better, 
we say, to have been thrown to the lions 
in the Coliseum, better to have marched to 
death with Joan of Arc, better to have been 
mobbed with Garrison and Love joy, than 
to live in a world where the eternal visions 
had perished." 

The doctrine of the conservation of en- 
ergy is familiar to all students of science. 
If we seek in the encyclopaedias for some 
exact definition of the term we are told 
that it signifies the preservation of the 
exact amount of energy which a force pos- 
sesses, even though, losing its original char- 
acter, it appears in other forms. Thus 
power may be transformed into velocity, so 
that what is lost in the former is gained 
in the latter, or vice versa; or it may be 
transformed, on the same principle, into 
heat. Thus there is the correlation of all 
the physical forces. It is demonstrated 
92 



^^Not Born to Die" 

that all the forces of nature — heat, light, 
electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, 
and motion — are convertible into each 
other. No force, therefore, is destroyed; 
it is only transformed into some equivalent 
capable of doing exactly the same amount 
of work which it, unchanged, could have 
done. Energy communicated to a body or 
system of bodies is never lost; it is merely 
distributed, and continues to exist as po- 
tential energy, as motion or as heat. 

It is not wonderful that this marvelous 
indestructibility in the natural realm should 
furnish a strong hint or suggestion of a 
parallel permanence and indestructibility in 
the mental or spiritual field. If it does not 
furnish an argument, it at least supplies 
us with a striking illustration of the im- 
perishability of the soul. Thus Carlyle ex- 
claims: "Is the lost friend still mysteriously 
here, even as we are here mysteriously, with 
God ? Know of a truth that only the Time- 
93 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

shadows have perished, or are perishable; 
that the real Being of whatever was, and 
whatever is, and whatever will be, is even 
now and forever." And Whittier, speak- 
ing of the ''last low swan-song'' of his 
friend Longfellow, writes: 

"His last ! And ours, dear friend, is near ; 
As clouds that rake the mountains here, 
We too shall pass and disappear. 

Yet howsoever changed or tost, ' 
Not even a wreath of mist is lost, 
No atom can itself exhaust. 

So shall the soul's superior force 
Live on and run its endless course 
In God's unlimited universe. 

And we, whose brief reflections seem 
To fade like clouds from lake and stream 
Shall brighten in a holier beam." 

Long, long before these recent centuries 
was the voice of the materialist and the 
agnostic heard in the world. There is a 
chapter of the Old Testament Apocrypha 
— it is to be found in the Wisdom of Sol- 

94 



^^Not Bom to Die" 

omon — which ought to be more familiar 

to Bible readers. Its description is almost 

modern and to the life, as it represents the 

infidel denier of that day speaking: 

''Our life is short and tedious, 
And in the death of man there is no remedy : 
Neither was there any man known to have 

returned from the grave. 
For we are born at all adventure: 
And we shall be hereafter as though we had 

never been : 
For the breath in our nostrih is as smoke. 
And a little spark in the moving of our heart: 
Which, being extinguished, our body shall be 

turned into ashes. 
And our spirit shall vanish as the soft air, 
And our name shall be forgotten in time. 
And no man shall have our works in remem- 
brance. 
And our life shall pass away as the trace of a 

cloud. 
And shall be dispersed as a mist 
That is driven away with the beams of the sun, 
And overcome with the heat thereof. 
For our time is a very shadow that passeth 

away; 
And after our end there is no returning: 
For it is fast sealed, so that no man cometh 

again. 

95 



'^Not Born to Die" 

Come on, therefore, let us enjoy the good things 
that are present: 

And let us speedily use the creatures like as in 
youth. 

Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and oint- 
ments : 

And let no flower of the Spring pass by us: 

Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds, before 
they be withered: 

Let none of us go without his part of our volup- 
tuousness ; 

Let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in every 
place : 

For this is our portion, and our lot is this." 

"Such things they did imagine, and were de- 
ceived : 

For their own wickedness hath blinded them. 

As for the mysteries of God, they knew them 
not: 

Neither hoped they for the wages of righteous- 
ness. 

Nor discerned a reward for blameless souls. 

For God created man to be immortal, 

And made him to be an image of his own 
eternity." 



96 



CHAPTER V 

Waiting for the Oarsman 

As ONI) nears the boundary line of this 
mortal life it is instinctive that his eyes 
should strain to catch the light in the win- 
dows from the home beyond. He becomes 
possessed of a reverent curiosity — an in- 
tense but chastened expectancy — as to what 
awaits him a few miles further on in his 
life's roadway. Well for him if he can 
have that calm faith in the Eternal Good- 
ness which enabled Whittier to sing in the 
familiar but immortal words: 

"And so, beside the Silent Sea, 
I wait the muffled oar; 
No harm from Him can come to me, 
On ocean or on shore." 

The mystery of the river of time, forever 
flowing into the ocean of eternity, is as old 
7 97 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

as the race, but its solemn impressiveness is 
as fresh and strong to-day as ever. To us 
as individuals the passage of years, in our 
ephemeral earthly lives, is of momentous, 
almost tragic, significance. Youth can 
hardly abide the slow progress of the 
months which seem to crawl by with pro- 
voking laggardness. Young men strain 
like hounds at the leash, impatient for the 
active doings of mature life. Tennyson, in 
'Xocksley Hall," speaks of the *'wild pulsa- 
tion" that he felt when he heard his days 
before him, and the tumult of his life — 
when he yearned for "the large excitement 
that the coming years would yield." So, 
to-day, looking out upon the world's ac- 
tivities — as Tennyson's boy, leaving his 
father's farm, eager-hearted, looked at the 
flaring lights of London — ^the young man of 
our times longs to be mixing with the turb- 
ulent whirl of living and acting. 

98 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

"And his spirit leaps within him to be gone before 

him then, 
Underneath the light he looks at, in among the 
throngs of men." 

But it is far different with those who 
have passed the meridian of life and come 
to the philosophic period of reflectiveness. 
For them the years hurry by like express 
trains. Hardly is one accustomed to writ- 
ing the figures of the new year before it 
is gone. Something like awe creeps over 
one as he thinks that, at the longest esti- 
mate, three-fourths of life is used up, and 
perhaps another decade — or at most two — 
will write finis to the story. He counts his 
years like a miser his gold. Not very long, 
and he knows he shall almost 

*'have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither, . . . 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 

He ponders, at times, upon the life of the 
hereafter. As Charles Cuthbert Hall says, 
99 

LOFC. 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

he is like a man who has read about India 
all his life, but now, at last, finds himself 
on board a steamer headed for that land, 
knowing that not many days off, its palms 
and strange cities will actually greet his 
eyesight. And he does not fear, but he is 
filled with the most intense kind of reverent 
curiosity. He has no gloomy and depre- 
ciatory view of life. It is Macbeth, the 
murderer and tyrant — ^the man with his 
conscience morbid and torturing him to 
sickness and utter weariness, who, on being 
told of the death of Lady Macbeth, takes 
it fatalistically — ''She should have died 
hereafter," — and he then falls into this 
pessimistic soliloquy: 

*'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle ! 
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 

lOO 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

And then is heard no more: it is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

Thank God, there has come to us, 
through Christ, a grander, more satisfac- 
tory interpretation of our existence, tran- 
sitory and troubled as it is, than that. 
While we hold to immortality and the 
larger life of Eternity, we still confess that 
our hearts are strangely wedded to these 
sweet, endeared scenes of earth, and that 
there comes a natural and painful reluc- 
tance with the thought of looking for the 
last time upon the familiar landscapes and 
faces. The future doubtless is far better; 
but we know nothing of it, while we do 
know this earthly life so well and so lov- 
ingly ! 

A recent writer, discoursing on 'Xife's 
Present Tense,'' speaks of the rich char- 
acter of the moment in which we live : ''The 
'now' of the actual life is never only the 

lOI 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

present moment. It is a compound, a dis- 
tillation. Its essence is an extract of all 
that has gone before ;" and he quotes other 
writers who say: "Can this hour be sordid 
when it is a piece of God's eternity? If 
God is not Love at this moment, He never 
was or will be ;" ''My body weeps and sighs, 
but a something in me, which is above me, 
rejoices at everything;" "everything infe- 
rior is a higher in the making, everything 
hateful a coming beautiful, everything evil 
a coming good, and we see it, all incom- 
plete as it is, and laugh and love it/' 

And if, with Phoebe Gary, the Christian 
reflects — 

"Closer and closer my steps 

Come to the dread abysm; 
Closer Death to my lips 
Presses the awful chrism.'' 

he still can trustfully hope and sing, in 
confidence that he is 

I02 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

"Nearer the bound of life, 

Where we lay our burdens down; 
Nearer leaving the cross, 
Nearer gaining the crown." 

Let us therefore go with God unafraid 
into the new future that He is making. 
Just as we should estimate each new day, 
on awakening, in the light of the opportuni- 
ties it may afford, not only of enjoyment, 
but of self-improvement and benefaction, 
so should we regard the dawn of every 
added year with strange curiosity and spec- 
ulation. No one knows what a day may 
bring forth — what a year may yield. Our 
days and years come to us freighted with 
all the riches of the past — all the accumu- 
lated quintessence of the centuries of wis- 
dom and experience. There is with us, 
with each recurring birthday anniversary, 
all the momentum of the past and all the 
vast hopefulness and inspiration of futurity. 
103 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Each day will be throbbing with thrilling 
life and pulsating with the destinies it car- 
ries in embryo. We should greet every 
day-dawn and year-dawn with a prayer 
and commence it with a thought of self- 
consecration. 

Life is not sufficiently regarded as mainly 
opportunity for character-building and 
testing. But we are to use life as essen- 
tially designed, not for getting and hold- 
ing, but for acquiring soul-worth in which 
lies salvation. By faith and love and 
prayer— by labor, by philanthropy, by self- 
culture, mental and spiritual — we are to 
seek unguessed treasures of wisdom and 
strength. We shall travel this way but 
once, and if we fail to get out of life what 
it was meant to yield us, we fail miserably. 
What largeness of salvation; what bound- 
lessness of God's love ; what sense of sacred 
nearness in His presence; what ineffable 
beauty in Jesus, what sublime victories for 
104 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

His kingdom ; what length and breadth and 
depth and height of spiritual privilege may 
come to us all if we cultivate the expectant 
and receptive mood and are willing in the 
day of His power! Not sitting down to 
chronic and useless bewailing, let each, 
learning wisdom from past defeats, and 
gathering new incentive and stronger de- 
termination from sad experiences, plunge 
into the fight again. Here is time, fresh 
as from creation, for use, for redemption 
of the past. If every hour of it is taken 
possession of in the name of the King, is 
made to yield some high return, the story 
when all told will make a noble volume. 

In such a faith and holy zeal we can fare 
on our way, softly saying as we go: 

"Father, the shadows fall 

Along my way: 

'Tis past the noon of day, 
My westering sun tells that the eve is near; 
I know, but feel no fear. 
And loved ones have gone home, — 

A holy band; 

105 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

I hear them call me from the spirit-land, 

A gentle call; 
Yes, dear ones, I shall come." 

It is natural that, when old age comes 
creeping on, and all the conduits of the 
blood seem like to freeze up, there should 
be some mental protest. Shakespeare de- 
picts one of the characters in these words : 

" Xet me not live,* quoth he, 
'After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff 
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses 
All but new things disdain/ " 

Despite all the husbanding of powers, 
after the meridian is past, at last there 
comes the time, as Emerson wrote, ^'to be 
old; to take in sail." It is not to be won- 
dered at that men who have been inten- 
sively active dislike to withdraw from the 
great world's activities. It takes some self- 
denial. They see that it ought to be done — 
that they have not the strength for the con- 
flict ; that the pace is too hot ; but still they 
io6 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

are reluctant. Let them hear the word of 
the Concord poet and philosopher : 

"Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime; 

Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
Right forward drive unharmed; 

The port well worth the cruise is near, 
And every wave is charmed/' 

Old age, unless broken by disease, need 
not be inactive and pass its time in idle- 
ness and vacancy. Age may be "a lusty 
winter, frostly but kindly." Men may re- 
tire from active business ; but there is much 
that remains. They can engage themselves 
in some philanthropic work; they can 
brighten other lives, encouraging and ad- 
vising those carrying on the work; they 
can keep an open eye for some who can 
help in highest enterprises. It was because 
Paul, the aged, felt that the time of his 
departure was come that he so earnestly 
exhorted Timothy, the young man, to suf- 
fer hardship, to do the work of an evan- 
gelist and fulfill his ministry. 
I07 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Every old man should maintain an active 
interest in life. The action of our times is 
so large and splendid — such a glorious 
spectacle, so full and rich — that it is in- 
conceivable that it should ever grow tame, 
even to the nonagenarian. Simply because 
one is old is no excuse for being splenetic 
and morose. Others may try to be patient 
under constant complainings, but no one 
has the right to put them to such strain. 
The querulous old person may be pardoned 
if suffering physically. He may be excused 
for some bit of sentiment, such as Jacob 
indulged in, saying, ''Few and evil have 
been the days of the years of my life ;" but 
if he has lived a virtuous and happy life 
there ought never to draw nigh any years 
wherein he shall say, ''I have no pleasure 
in them.'' 

It has been well said that the devil has 
no happy old people. Retribution for a life 
of sin is peculiarly experienced in old age, 
io8 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

and whatsoever a man has sowed he cer- 
tainly reaps then. Respect for old age 
must be based on character. Men must 
have that which shall call for veneration. 
If they have lived selfish or animal lives, 
if they add foolishness and wickedness to 
senility, they will inspire disgust more than 
reverence. It is only to the righteous that 
the promise is made, ''Thou shalt come to 
thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of 
corn cometh in" — ripened, perfected, the fit- 
ting close of a well-ordered life. 

There is necessity of constantly inform- 
ing the mind in early and midlife, in order 
to store up a fund for the reflection of age, 
and not to be left to vacant garrulousness. 
And who of us have not known many old 
people, bright, sunny, enthusiastic, keeping 
pace with every advance in thought, the 
warm gulf-stream of youth sweeping far 
up around the arctic zones of life? They 
do not know how to become dull and vege- 
109 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

tative, or to relapse into monotony and in- 
anity. They cease at once to labor and to 
live. They say with Longfellow: 

*'Ah! nothing is too late, 
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. 
The night hath not yet come, we are not quite 
Cut off from labor by the failing light; 
Something remains for us to do or dare, 
Even the oldest trees some fruit may bear; 
For age is opportunity no less 
Than youth itself, tho' in another dress." 

Old people should endeavor, as much as 
in them lies, to adjust themselves to the 
changing circumstances of the advancing 
times. In society, the State and Church, 
the old order forever changes, yielding 
place to new. There is much good in con- 
servatism. It is a check to rashness and 
impulsiveness. But there may be an undue 
laudation of the past, and there should be 
an eager welcome to the new truths of the 
new age, which, as much as any in the past, 
may bear the sign-manual of God. God's 
no 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

new Messiahs should evermore receive the 
blessing of the aged Simeons and Annas 
in the temple. The faith of Whittier should 
belong to all : 

"Others shall sing the song, 
Others shall right the wrong — 
Finish what I begin, 
And all I fail of win. 

Hail to the coming singers ! 
Hail to the brave light-bringers ! 
Forward I reach and share 
All that they sing and dare." 

How beautiful is old age in the life of 
the home ! What would our homes be with- 
out the little children on the one hand and 
the white-haired grandfathers and grand- 
mothers on the other? Despite the per- 
sonal quaintness and the old-fashioned 
ways, over which we may smile in good 
humor, no loss would be greater than the 
absence of those who, like the last leaf upon 
the tree, are clinging to old, forsaken 

XII 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

boughs, and who are only waiting till the 
shadows are a little longer grown. 

How beautiful is it to see the husband 
and wife growing old together, assimilating 
each other's virtues, becoming more and 
more alike in every characteristic, and 
pathetically holding to each other! Earth 
has few more lovely and touching sights 
than that which Burns celebrates: 

"John Anderson, my jo, John, 

We clamb the hill thegither; 
And mony a canty day, John, 
We've had wi' ane anither: 

Now we maun totter down, John, 

But hand in hand we'll go; 
And sleep thegither at the foot, 

John Anderson, my jo." 

Old age can claim, too, many compensa- 
tions. There is the beautiful affection of 
children and grandchildren. This side of 
heaven there is nothing more picturesque 
and lovely than little four-year in the lap 
of eighty, whispering, ''Grandpa, I '11 take 

112 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

care of you!" There are the picture-gal- 
leries of memory — recollections which 
bring serenest happiness. There are the re- 
membrances of the ways of God with his 
servant, and the never-ceasing supplies of 
His grace. These minister to his soul sac- 
ramentally. Increasingly he finds the 
truths of these Scriptures verified in his 
experience: 'It shall come to pass, that at 
evening time there shall be light;'' ''Even 
to old age I am he, and even to hoar hairs 
will I carry you;" and he exclaims with 
the Psalmist: 

"O God, thou hast taught me from my youth; 
And hitherto have I declared thy wondrous 

works. 
Yea, even when I am old and grayheaded, O 

God, forsake me not, 
Until I have declared thy strength unto the next 

generation, 
Thy might to every one that is to come.'' 

It is the natural result of advancing years 
that there should be a subsidence of pas- 
8 113 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

sion. Some of the battles that belonged to 
youth need not be longer fought. There 
has come to be a habitude in virtue. One 
can feel — not in any boastful sense that 
fails to attribute it to Christ's help — that 
he has entered into some sort of permanent 
victory — that he has fought the good fight, 
finished his course, and kept the faith. 

By long service and contemplation, by 
prayer, faith, obedience, and the society of 
the good, the aged saint has grown more 
and more into likeness to Christ, being 
changed into the same image from glory 
to glory. Like fruit hanging in a southern 
exposure, he ripens and mellows continu- 
ally. His face seems to reflect the light of 
heaven, and the inner glory breaks through 
in transfiguration. His soul has built it- 
self more stately mansions. His prayers 
are now mostly of praise and communion, 
and he delights always in his Father's pres- 
ence. 

114 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

His Bible has his own biography in it, 
which he can read between the lines. It 
is his thumb-worn diary, saturated with his 
experiences. He has marked the preachers' 
texts, and he knows the chapters read in 
his hours of sorrow, when the dear wife 
or child lay in the coffin. 

His hearing may have failed so that he 
can not catch what the minister says, and 
it may be he can not read the hymns. But 
he sits in the house of God with joy, and 
worships with his brethren, his heart blend- 
ing with theirs. Memory brings up pic- 
tures of former worshipers. 

"Part of His host have crossed the flood, 
And part are crossing now." 

His voice may be thin and quavering in 
songs, but he never had such impulses to 
praise as now. 

Young people find his experience, when 
they are perplexed and discouraged, most 

115 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

helpful. It Is heartening to see one who 
has been sixty years in the way. Listening 
to his testimony concerning the wonderful 
way by which God has led him, one feels 
that he, too, may be supported unto the end. 
It is refreshing to hear the old man say 
that he is still advancing in the knowledge 
of the Christian mysteries, even as Paul, 
in age, confessed that he had not already 
attained nor was already made perfect, but 
that he was reaching forth to the things 
before, and pressing toward the mark. 

Age has opportunity for reflection, for 
calmer meditation, denied in active life. 
All the goodness of God passes before the 
mind in retrospect. The truth of the 
Psalmist is felt, ''His mercy endureth for- 
ever." There is but one glad answer to 
the question, "Have the mercies of God 
been small unto thee?" 

It is not to be wondered at that the 
thoughts of the old man should dwell much 
ii6 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

on the hereafter. More whom he has 
known are over there than here, and his 
thoughts are much with them. 

With calm trust he approaches the verge 
of the other Hfe. He hears the surge of 
the infinite sea. The Hfe beyond is almost 
more real to him than "this chimera which 
we devour and call life." He is full of 
reverent curiosity and speculation concern- 
ing what it is like. 

Meanwhile, with Browning, he can say: 

**Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made; 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, *A whole I planned. 
Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be 
afraid/ " 

The claim is sometimes made that old 
people are comparatively indifferent about 
immortality — that they have had enough of 
life, and are simply tired of living. Harriet 
Martineau gave expression to something 
117 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

like this. But we have failed to meet one 
or many such among true Christian believ- 
ers. Rather are they so enamored of life 
that they claim it in the future in larger 
and richer draughts. Having lived with 
God in time, they desire to live with him 
throughout eternity. If the vision here, 
seen in a mirror darkly, be so rapturous, 
what will it be when the sight is face to 
face? And so the old Christian is confi- 
dent of immortality. He has no such pen- 
sive and depressed mood as that of Whit- 
man, who wrote in old age of his pros- 
pects : 

^'The soft, voluptuous, opiate shades, 
The sun gone down, the eager light dispelled — 
(I, too, will soon be gone, dispelled) — 
A haze, nirvana, rest and night, oblivion." 

No ; he has his life in God, and he needs 
no other argument for his future existence 
with God. With joy he hears the Watch- 
ii8 



Waiting for the Oarsman 

man calling, "The night cometh — also the 
morning !' 

He sees his body perishing, but he is not 
appalled. He knows that he is not dying — 
his ego, soul, personality. It is only the 
outward man decaying, while the inward 
man is being renewed, day by day. It is 
only the taking down of the tent, in order 
that the permanent home may be put up. 
He knows that if the earthly house of his 
tabernacle be dissolved he has a building 
of God — a house not made with hands, 
eternal, in the heavens. 

"Decay then tenements of dust, 

Pillars of earthly pride decay; 
A nobler mansion waits the just, 
And Jesus has prepared the way." 

Thus his life is widened and deepened, 

flowing in full, strong current. He takes 

hold of existence in all of its dimensions — 

past, present, and future. He believes that 

119 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

for him there shall be no moaning of the 
bar when he puts out to sea, but that he 
shall see his Pilot face to face. He dies 
peacefully and blissfully, saying with 
Charles Wesley: 

*'In age and feebleness extreme, 
Who shall a helpless worm redeem? 
Jesus, my only hope Thou art. 
Strength of my failing flesh and heart; 
O could I catch one smile from Thee, 
And drop into eternity!" 



1 20 



CHAPTER VI 

''The Unforgotten Faces" 

We) must not think of the Christ simply 
in relation to His historical past, but as 
the Ever-living One; not as One who was 
raised and who ascended to some remote 
heaven nineteen hundred years ago, but as 
One who appears to us on any Easter morn- 
ing, just as He appeared to the women and 
His disciples on the first Lord's-day, the 
day of resurrection. Margaret Sangster 
voices this thought very sweetly in these 
lines : 

*'The morning springs exultant! Christ is risen! 
No bars for life in death's swift-shattered prison. 
Lo ! the day breaks, the shadows flee away ; 
Lo! Christ is with us, even as we pray. 
Lord, come. Lord Jesus. He is with us here, 
Forever present and forever dear." 

121 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

And she expresses the same faith beau- 
tifully with reference to those who have 
faded from our vision ; who have been 
swallowed up in the light which is too in- 
tense for our mortal gaze, but who, never- 
theless, need not necessarily be imagined 
as far removed and entirely disconnected 
from us. Rather is it natural and rational 
to conceive the opposite as the better prob- 
ability. And Mrs. Sangster speaks in her 
poem ''To One Gone Home" in such touch- 
ing words as these: 

*'And often it is clear to me 

That here and there are not apart, 
That somehow God's whole family 

Have scarce the throbbing of one heart 
To separate them; just a breath — 
The shadowy, thin, soft veil of death. 

To you, dear one, whose very tones 
Still vibrate in your empty room, 

To you, athwart whatever zones 

For you are bright with fadeless bloom, 

I send my whole heart's love to-day, 

The day my darling went away." 

122 



^The Unforgotten Faces^' 

Dr. Hugo Mlinsterberg, Professor of 
Psychology in Harvard, has presented the 
pubHc with a dreary essay on "Eternal 
Life/' He puts his argument in the form 
of a colloquy with another, presumably a 
Christian believer, as the two have just 
returned from the burial of a dear and 
mutual friend. In order to console his 
Christian comrade in his grief he pours 
out on him some seven close pages of ab- 
stract metaphysics, hard to comprehend, 
and arid as Sahara. It is difficult to under- 
stand how the bored and doubly afflicted 
companion could resist the impulse to stop 
his ears or run away. Surely, when his 
heart was laden with sorrow, he was in no 
mood to listen to a dry-as-dust, scholastic, 
class-room lecture with spider-web distinc- 
tions and deductions. 

The only eternal life that is offered is 
such contribution as we may have made 
to absolute truth which is final and abides 
123 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

while all else is transitory. "The complete 
perfection of the beautiful, the moral deed, 
the intellectual achievement, the work of 
civilization, the religious faith, the repose 
of philosophical conviction" — these are 
finalities into which our lives may be 
wrought in an essential immortality, as it 
is styled. We ourselves perish, but they 
continue. ''In eternity," says Professor 
Miinsterberg, "lies the reality of our friend, 
who will never sit with us again here at 
the fireplace. I do not think that I should 
love him better if I hoped that he might 
be somewhere waiting through space and 
time to meet us again. . . . He lived his 
life in realizing absolute values through his 
devotion to truth and beauty, to morality 
and religion; as such an irreplaceable part 
of the eternal world he is eternal himself." 
The immortality of the individual life which 
has passed from sight is simply ''its perfect 
belonging to that whole timeless reality." 
124 



^^The Unforgotten Faces" 

Its personality ''belongs eternally to our 
world aims." 

We have called such doctrine dreary, and 
so it is. It is the quintessence of despair. 
George Eliot gave the faith or unfaith of 
Positivism eloquent poetical expression in 
''The Choir Invisible/' in which she prayed 
to live again "in thoughts sublime that 
pierce the night like stars," and that she 
might be "the sweet presence of a good dif- 
fused." But exalted as are the strains of 
that poetry, there is the undertone of that 
unutterable sadness in them which pervades 
all of George Eliot's later works, and which 
came to her with the eclipse of her girlhood 
faith. Philosophy may strive to put this 
pantheistic creed of the extinction of the 
individual and the perpetuation of his in- 
fluence, if he had haply labored for the 
true and right, into some appearance of 
profound reasoning, but the human heart, 
finding the proffered fruit — Dead Sea ap- 
125 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

pies — turning to ashes in the mouth, in- 
stinctively repudiates it and turns away 
almost indignantly at the hollow mockery 
offered as a substitute for its insatiable, 
ineradicable, and pathetic longings. To live 
again without individuality, personality, 
name, form, being, consciousness, intelli- 
gence, love, or will — simply as an imaginary 
abstraction, as a constituent part of Abso- 
lute Truth, or as a minute portion of the 
Abiding Reality in the Eternal Idea — this 
has in it small inspiration and less solace. 
The Christian believes truly in an im- 
mortality of influence, but not as an alterna- 
tive or substitute for personal immortality. 
The dead who die in the Lord are blessed, 
for their works do follow them. But they 
also follow their works and continue their 
working. And the Christian, no more than 
the Positivist, conceives of his immortality 
simply as everlastingness, a mere expan- 
sion, a mere extension in time that can not 
126 



'^The Unforgotten Faces" 

add any new value or dignity to his soul. 
While he lives on he believes he will live 
deeply. The quality of his life will equal 
its quantity, its intensiveness its extensive- 
ness. There as here for him to live will be 
Christ, and eternal life will be to know God 
and Him He sent. 

The faith of the New Testament; the 
faith of Jesus and His disciples; the faith 
of the multitudes of Christian believers in 
all the centuries since that first Easter morn 
is this: we shall live on beyond death and 
the grave as conscious personalities, know- 
ing ourselves, knowing our friends, and 
being known by them. Tennyson in ''In 
Memoriam" expresses that undying con- 
viction of the human soul, with which it 
will not part, in these memorable words: 

"My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live for evermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is." 

127 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

And he turns away from all cold general- 
izations and unsatisfying intimations of a 
merely abstract immortality of influence in 
the future with this protest : 

''That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 
Remerging in the general Soul, 

Is faith as vague as all unsweet: 
Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside. 

And I shall know him when we meet; 

And we shall sit at endless feast, 
Enjoying each the other's good. 
What vaster dream can hit the mood 

Of Love on earth?" 

How pathetically and inevitably do our 
thoughts, at each recurrence of the Easter 
festival, go out to those whom "we have 
loved long since and lost awhile!'' The 
deepest, tenderest chords of memory are 
struck again while we wonder and specu- 

128 



"The Unforgotten Faces" 

late concerning their habitation, state, and 
occupation. They lie in our recollections, 
stripped of their earthly imperfections, and 
with only the holiest and best in them sur- 
viving. Their lives and deaths have made 
immortality reasonable and actual to us. 
They have brought the other world very 
nigh. They woo us upward toward them- 
selves, and fasten our reflections upon 
things in the heavenly places. We are fond 
of speculating upon how it fares with them, 
and of wondering whether, even at the time 
we are thinking of them, they may not be 
also thinking of us. We can never doubt 
that they continue to love us still. And how 
we long to see them again, to call their 
names, to hear them speak our own! Na- 
ture and the world of business go on the 
same as before they left us. 

"But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still!" 

9 129 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

And how strong grows the conviction 
within us that the separation of their lives 
from ours is but temporary ! It shall be but 
for *'a little while." Whittier again and 
again sounds for us that sweet note of re- 
union : 

''No voice is heard, no sign is made, 
No step is on the conscious floor! 
Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust 
(Since He who knows our need is just) 
That somehow, somewhere meet we must." 

In his latest, as well as his earliest writ- 
ings, he is ever recurring to the same dear 
theme. In ''Burning Driftwood" he refers 
gravely and affectionately to the 

"Dear souls who left us lonely here. 

Bound on their last, long voyage, to whom 
We, day by day, are drawing near. 
Where every bark ha^ sailing room." 

Some of his most touching verses are 
called "At Last." As the final moment of 
the beloved "Quaker Poet" approached, 
130 



^^The Unforgotten Faces" 

they were recited by one of the Httle group 
of relatives who stood by his bedside. 
Blending a humihty which is almost self- 
effacement wath an infinite yearning, it em- 
bodies a confession that is variously and 
beautifully expressed by him in several 
other places: 

''No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, 
Nor street of shining gold. 

Suffice it if — my good and ill unreckoned, 
And both forgiven through Thy abounding 
grace — 

I find myself by hands familiar beckoned 
Unto my fitting place." 

In another companion poem, "What the 
Traveler Said at Sunset/' he comes back 
again to the same conception which took 
such a hold upon his heart : 

"I go to find my lost and longed for 

Safe in Thy sheltering goodness still, 
And all that hope and faith foreshadow 
Made perfect in Thy holy will." 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

We think many will share our conviction 
that "Andrew Rykman's Prayer" is one of 
the rarest productions in our literature — 
broad in scope, tender in feeling, and choice 
in diction. How reverently does Rykman 
breathe forth his trust that in 

"Some sweet morning yet in God's 
Dim seonian periods, 
Joyful I shall wake to see 
Those I love who rest in Thee, 
And to them in Thee allied. 
Shall my soul be satisfied." 

And let Whittier's lines, addressed to his 
departed friend and fellow-author, James 
T. Fields, express our prayer and hope in 
connection with those from our home cir- 
cles and groups of friends who have gone 
before us into some one of the many rooms 
of the ''Father's house," but who will never 
be forgotten while memory holds her seat: 

"Keep for us, O friend, where'er 
Thou art waiting, all that here 
Made thy earthly presence dear. 

132 



'^The Unforgotten Faces" 

And when fall our feet as fell 

Thine upon the asphodel, 

Let thy old smile greet us well ; 

Proving in a world of bliss 
What we fondly dream in this — 
Love is one with holiness !" 



133 



CHAPTER VII 

The Communion of Saints 

This phrase, which occurs in the Apos- 
tles' Creed, and which forms a part of the 
Confession of Faith — the Credo, the "I be- 
Heve'' — of so many thousands in our own 
Church and other Churches, has had its 
real significance long and earnestly debated. 
The question may be said to be somewhat 
undecided even yet. The phrase first ap- 
pears as a part of the Creed in a Gallic text 
of the Fifth Century. The interpretation 
which commonly attaches to the words to- 
day is that of communion or fellowship of 
believers with each other. And this cer- 
tainly is something so high and worthy that 
it deserves a place in a universal confession, 

134 



The Communion of Saints 

such as is the Apostles' Creed. This is the 
interpretation which the Reformers gave it, 
and which has been generally accepted by 
Protestants. In their view the Church itself 
is ''a communion of saints." 

But the weight of critical opinion to-day 
is, that this is not the significance that the 
phrase had when it was first admitted to 
the Creed. 

The Church is indeed a communion of 
saints ; but, it is contended, this was not the 
thought that was in the mind of those who 
inserted the phrase in close connection with 
the mention of the resurrection and the life 
everlasting. The Church, rather, has ''a 
communion of saints.'' Professor McGif- 
fert, one of the lastest authorities, contends 
that the word ''Communio'' is an abstract 
noun, and not equivalent to ''congregation' 
It rather is to be taken in the sense of par- 
ticipation in, or fellowship or converse with. 
In this view, he says, it signifies communion 
135 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

with the believers of all ages, more particu- 
larly with the saints and angels in heaven. 
The reference is primarily to the commun- 
ion to be enjoyed in heaven after death. 
Possibly two meanings have insensibly 
blended; for whoever enjoys real partici- 
pation in the sacraments enjoys also com- 
munion with the saints and vice versa. 

And the faith of the Church is receiving 
corroboration to-day from the leaders of 
scientific thought. Sir Oliver J. Lodge, 
LL. D., F. R. S.— Principal of the Univer- 
sity of Birmingham and one of the fore- 
most scientists and review-writers of our 
day — has issued the text of a Catechism, 
written from the standpoint of his own pro- 
fessional thought, and designed for the use 
of teachers in the religious education of 
the young. In it he defines the significance 
of the ''Communion of saints'' in these 
terms : ''Higher and holier beings must pos- 
136 



The Communion of Saints 

sess in fuller fruition those privileges of 
communion which already are foreshad- 
owed by our own faculties, the language, 
and sympathy, and mutual aid, and just as 
we find our power of friendly help not alto- 
gether limited to our own order of being, 
so I conceive an existence of mighty fellow- 
ship of love and service." 

Thus the phrase ''Communion of saints'' 
is seen to be an elastic and expansive one, 
and we are not forbidden to read into it all 
of the grand meanings to which we have 
referred. We can confess our belief in a 
communion — a common unity — of the faith- 
ful believers bound together in delightful 
fellowship here within beloved local Church 
folds, while still feeling themselves a part 
of the vast body of Christians of whatever 
name in all lands, and rejoicing in the pos- 
session of common aims, joys, and graces. 
We can confess our gratitude in being al- 
137 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

lowed to participate in common in the sac- 
raments which draw our souls so wonder- 
fully together. We can exult as we declare 
ourselves indissolubly linked to all the gen- 
erations — saints, confessors, martyrs — who 
have gone before us throughout the Chris- 
tian centuries. 

The inspiration of all that ancient and 
heroic past enters into and aggrandizes our 
lives as we "apprehend with all saints what 
is the breath and length and height and 
depth'' of the love of Christ. 

And we can confess joyously that we 
think of ourselves, not dissevered from, but 
in life-giving touch and uplifting mystical 
communion with, the saints who are in 
heaven; that we can at least in thought if 
not in ways more real, enjoy this commun- 
ion now and do not have to wait for it until 
after death ; that, without any approach to 
the worship of saints or their relics, with- 
out consenting to any of the vagaries of 

138 



The Communion of Saints 

spiritualism, we still conceive that the 
Church triumphant and the Church militant 
are not separated nor separable. And so 
we sing with Charles Wesley : 

"Come, let us join our friends above 

That have obtained the prize, 
And on the eagle wings of love 

To joys celestial rise. 
Let all the saints terrestrial sing, 

With those to glory gone; 
For all the servants of our King, 

In earth and heaven are one. 

One family we dwell in Him, 

One Church above, beneath, 
Though now divided by the stream, 

The narrow stream of death. 
One army of the living God, 

To His command we bow ; 
Part o± His host have crossed the flood, 

And part are crossing now." 

The reference of Wesley is to that most 
remarkable phrase which St. Paul uses in 
his letter to the Ephesians when he repre- 
sents himself in prayer for them, bowing 

139 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

his knees "unto the Father, from whom 
every family in heaven and on earth is 
named." It clearly indicates that family 
life is perpetuated in the future. The bonds 
that unite those, who have departed into the 
bliss of the Beyond, with us who yet remain 
in this life have not been severed at all. 
They and we may maintain most vital and 
sympathetic relationships. It may very rea- 
sonably be as Harriet Beecher Stowe sings : 

"Sweet hearts around us throb and beat, 

Sweet helping hands are stirred, 
And palpitates the veil between, 
With breathings almost heard." 

There may certainly exist, then, the inter- 
communion of saints in heaven with those 
on earth. We ought never to deny our- 
selves the solace of this high truth, at the 
same time that we repudiate decisively its 
burlesque and caricature in the farce and 
fraud of modern spiritualism. Let us hold 
to the "Communion of saints." 
140 



The Communion of Saints 

In the Apostles' Creed, as printed in our 
Discipline, the words "The Communion of 
Saints" are joined — separated by a comma 
— in one phrase to the words "The Holy 
Catholic Church" as if the one were a fuller 
definition of the other. But, as a matter of 
fact, in repeating the Creed in our Churches 
we follow a right instinct and hit the truth 
by making the comma as it should be, a 
semi-colon. "The Communion of Saints" 
should stand in f_ie Creed by itself as a 
separate item and enumeration of things 
believed. As the most recent and scholarly 
commentator on the Creed says: "It was 
used sometimes to denote participation in 
sacred things; that is, the sacraments — 
sometimes to denote communion with de- 
parted saints. And one or the other of 
these meanings probably attaches to the 
article in the Creed. There is no sign that 
the article was intended to express the com- 
munion or fellowship of believers with each 
141 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

other, or that it was meant as a closer defi- 
nition of the word 'Church/ as we com- 
monly interpret it to-day." 

The possibility of our communion in the 
spirit with the sainted dead is certainly one 
of the most elevating and sanctifying 
thoughts that one can entertain. The very 
conception of it is purifying and uplifting. 
Tennyson, thinking of his dead friend Ar- 
thur Hallam, says : 

"How pure at heart and sound in head, 
With what divine affections bold 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 
An hour's communion with the dead.'* 

And again: 

"Do we indeed desire the dead 

Should still be near us at our side? 
Is there no baseness we would hide? 
No inner vileness that we dread?" 

But nevertheless he invokes passionately 
the spirit of his friend gone from him : 
142 



The Communion of Saints 

"Descend, and touch, and enter; hear 

The wish too strong for words to name. 
That in this blindness of the frame 
My ghost may feel that thine is near." 

Is it not true that, influenced by tra- 
ditional but surely erroneous notions, we 
put our dead away from thoughts of any 
possible converse in the spirit? We hold 
them dear and sacred in our memories, but 
rarely treasure the hope or conviction that 
"spirits from their golden day" may, per- 
haps, ''haunt the silence of the breast" and, 
coming from "unconjectured bliss," mingle • 
their minds with ours, and silently speak,- 
"spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost." 

James Buckham in his recent book of 
beautiful verse, rebukes reverently the atti- 
tude of mind which, as soon as our dead 
are under the sod, puts them far away as 
though they were snatched to some farthest 
star. He does not conceive that they dwell 
in some far and foreign land. We must 

143 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

draw closer to them, through Hfe and death 
walking, as of old, hand in hand. Of the 
loved ones ''on the other side of the stream" 
he says: 

"They carry us in their thoughts ; 

They speak of us when they meet, 
And ever and ever the troth of old 
Bides with them, warm and sweet. 

O, patient and constant dead, 

Whom so easily we put by, 
Who fade away from our inmost thoughts, 

A& the stars fade out of the sky. 

Ah, me ! it is pitiful so, 
Dear lovers, so leal and near, 

Aye, pressing their faces against the gates 
Of our hearts, and we will not hear !" 

In a re^cent article on ''The Humanity of 
the Blessed Dead" the contributor — a uni- 
versity professor — writes most suggestively 
and, to our minds, most comfortingly, in 
these words : "If the soul still lives, its social 
sympathies survive, and the future life will 
be a community life. Thus the Scriptures 
represent it. It is the life of 'a great multi- 
144 



The Communion of Saints 

tude/ a great communal life. Its social 
harmonies are among the chief character- 
istics and glories of that high estate. If 
the blessed dead are human still, they have 
not lost the old love of earth, and the old 
longing for fellowship and the old aspiring 
and the old striving for holy achievement. 
And what mean ^the prayers of all the 
saints,' and the lofty, accordant praises and 
jubilations of the 'great multitude,' if they 
be not a perpetuation of the old fellowship 
instincts of earth?" 

And this beautiful and consoling faith 
appeals strongly to our poets. Thus John 
Banister Tabb voices his own comforting 
conviction : 

"They can not wholly pass away, 

How far soe'er above; 
Nor we, the lingerers, wholly stay 

Apart from those we love : 
For spirits in eternity. 

As shadows in the sun. 
Reach backward into Time, as we. 

Like lifted clouds, reach on.'' 

lO 145 



CHAPTER VIII 
'^For the Faithful Departed" 

Is it our privilege to do more than 
simply remember our dead? Or, if we go 
further and believe that we may indeed 
commune with them in the spirit, do we 
reach the limit there? Is there any bar 
put upon the promptings of our hearts to 
breathe out loving, trustful supplication for 
them as of old? Do the Scriptures, ration- 
ally interpreted, place any prohibition on 
such petition? Some people may even re- 
gard the bare suggestion as a heresy and 
a profanation. But surely the subject is 
not one closed to all reverent speculation. 

In nothing that we write here are we 
dogmatizing. The Scriptures are so silent 
about the conditions of the other life that 
146 



"For the Faithful Departed" 

it IS foolish to dogmatize on one side or the 
other of such a proposition. When it comes 
to definite knowledge about the conditions 
of existence beyond the grave we all know 
so little — almost absolutely nothing — that 
dogmatic assertion is ruled out altogether. 
All that the most learned theologian can do 
is to offer reverent and tentative sugges- 
tions. And we do not conceive that we are 
restrained from doing that — nothing more 
— in this writing. 

We are as far as possible from commit- 
ting ourselves to the Roman Catholic prac- 
tice of paying priests for masses for the 
repose of the souls of the dead. Around 
that practice a vast amount of superstition 
has gathered, and not a little ecclesiastical 
avarice and extortion. Protestants are ac- 
customed to doing their own praying. They 
do not hire ministers to present by proxy 
their holiest aspirations to the Almighty. 
If they shall speak to the Lord concerning 
147 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

their dead it will be the utterance of their 
own hearts and not a formal and mechan- 
ical ritual-mass by another only remotely 
concerned. 

Is it claimed that definite supplication for 
the dead is ruled out by the theology which 
teaches that it is utterly useless and unavail- 
ing since it could effect nothing — since the 
dead are in a fixed condition of joy and 
have all consummation of blessings? We 
may well pause to question it. Is it not 
reasonable to believe that in heaven itself 
there are gradations of happiness, possible 
growth into larger and fuller bliss, ever- 
advancing progress toward the perfection 
which is in God? Is it rational to suppose 
that our dead are to maintain a flat, sta- 
tionary condition of dead-level in that Land 
of Vast Opportunity? Was not Tennyson 
right in describing the life of the future as 

^'Eternal process moving on, 
From state to state the spirit walks ?" 

148 



^Tor the Faithful Departed" 

And, if so, can we repress our profoundest 
wish that our departed ones may advance 
by sure steps through the circuits of their 
orbits, unto "a higher height, a deeper 
deep?'' And is not that wish truly a 
prayer ? Yea, does there not He, latent and 
unexpressed, a real prayer at the heart of 
all love? And as we love the holy dead 
must not our love breathe out a petition for 
their constant and increasing advancement 
in the happiness and holiness of heaven? 
Mrs Julia C. Dorr has expressed our 
meaning in a beautiful little poem called 
''Somewhere :" 

*'How can I cease to pray for thee? Somewhere 

In God's great universe thou art to-day. 
Can He not reach thee with His tender care? 
Can He not hear me when for thee I pray? 

Somewhere thou livest, and hast need of Him ; 
Somewhere thy soul sees higher heights to 
clim^b ; 
And somewhere still, there may be valleys dim 
That thou must pass to reach the hills sub- 
lime. 

149 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Then all the more, because thou canst not hear 
Poor, human words of blessing, will I pray, 

O, true, brave heart, God bless thee, wheresoever 
In His great universe thou art to-day." 

At the root of every ancient error and 
superstition may be found some truth v^hich 
has been distorted and perverted. We Prot- 
estants do not believe in the worship of 
saints, much less in the v^orship of their 
relics. But we do believe in reverencing 
and cherishing their memories and so gath- 
ering inspiration for duty. We do not be- 
lieve in invocation of the saints, since we 
can not conceive of them as omnipresent 
and capable of listening to prayers offered 
from opposite sides of the earth. But we 
need not deny ourselves the consolation of 
thinking that, of their own motion and love, 
they pray for us. We do not believe in a 
Purgatory as offered in a formal, artificial, 
mechanical scheme of theology, but we may 
rationally conceive that, over there as here, 
150 



'Tor the Faithful Departed" 

advancement in holiness is effected by a 
constant disciplining of the will in higher 
and higher virtue, and our hope that our 
friends may thus secure this larger spiritual 
profit may be essentially a prayer for them. 
When Bishop Lavington in his ''Enthusi- 
asm of Methodists and Papists Compared" 
accused Mr. Wesley of having no small 
tendency to Popery in his writings, and es- 
pecially in his praying for the dead, Mr. 
Wesley replied: ''Your fourth argument is 
that in a collection of Prayers I cite the 
words of an ancient Liturgy, 'For the Faith- 
ful Departed.' Sir, whenever I use those 
words in the Burial Service, I pray to the 
same eifect, — 'That we, with all who are 
departed in Thy faith and fear, may have 
our perfect consummation and bliss, both 
in body and soul ;' yea, and whenever I say 
'Thy kingdom come,' for I mean both the 
kingdom of grace and glory. In this kind 
of prayer therefore 'for the faithful de- 
151 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

parted/ I conceive myself to be clearly jus- 
tified, both by the earliest antiquity, by the 
Church of England, and by the Lord's 
Prayer." 

In his Letter to Rev. Dr. Conyers Mid- 
dleton, occasioned by the Doctor's "Free 
Inquiry," Mr. Wesley says: ''It is certain 
'praying for the dead was common in the 
second century.' You might have said, 
'And in the first also,' seeing that the pe- 
tition 'Thy kingdom come' manifestly con- 
cerns the saints in paradise as well as those 
on earth." 

In the "Forms of Prayer for Every Day 
in the Week," as alluded to by Bishop Lav- 
ington, Mr. Wesley uses the following pe- 
titions : 

"Let Thy Fatherly hand be over them, 
and Thy Holy Spirit be ever with them; 
that submitting themselves entirely to Thy 
will, and directing their thoughts, words, 
and works to Thy glory, they and those 
152 



"For the Faithful Departed" 

that are already dead in the Lord may at 
length enjoy Thee in the glories of Thy 
kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord/' 

"Forgive all who are mine enemies, and 
so reconcile them to me and Thyself that 
we all, together with those who now sleep 
in Thee, may awake to life everlasting." 

''Grant that we, with those who are al- 
ready dead in Thy faith and fear, may to- 
gether partake of a joyful resurrection." 

"Bring us, with all those who have 
pleased Thee from the beginning of the 
world, into the glories of Thy Son's king- 
dom." 

"I commend to Thy mercy the souls of 
all that are departed this life in Thy true 
faith and fear." 

"Vouchsafe to bring us, with those who 
are dead in Thee, to rejoice together before 
Thee, through the merits of our Lord Jesus 
Christ." 

And with Wesley agrees a present-day 
153 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

thinker, Professor Lewis O. Brastow, D. D., 
of Yale University : 

''The Church on earth and in heaven are 
one. The saints are human. They remem- 
ber, they love, they desire, they aspire, they 
pray, they worship, they achieve. If they 
pray and remember, surely they must pray 
for us, and we, too, should remember them. 

"The power of the Roman Church is in 
some large measure in its grip upon the 
continuity of human life. Prayer with the 
sainted dead was at an early period one of 
the forms in which fellowship was realized. 
When on earth the Church prayed, whether 
in the common worship of the sanctuary 
or in the holy eucharist, or in the burial 
of the dead, it entered into fellowship with 
the saints above. 

"We Protestants need our saints'-days, 
our memorial-days, commemorative of our 
own dead. In all the highest and holiest 
services we may well remember that the 

154 



^Tor the Faithful Departed" 

saints have never died to God and are not 
dead to us and are still a part of God's great 
Church. We need to remember ourselves 
as in relation with them. And if we may 
hope that they remember us and pray for 
us, why may we not remember them and 
pray for them? Prayer for the dead may 
be no function committed to the Church, 
but it is no function of Protestantism to 
repress the instincts of the Christian heart. 
The saints in heaven are human. Shall 
saints on earth be less human?" 

The following, entitled ''A Prayer for a 
Friend Out of Sight,'' is attributed, we 
know not on what competent authority, to 
William Ewart Gladstone. Its remarkable 
beauty, simplicity, pathos, and human feel- 
ing has affected many and many a reader: 

"O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, 
in whose embrace all creatures live, in what- 
soever world or condition they be; I be- 
seech Thee for him whose name and dwell- 
155 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

ing-place and every need Thou knowest: 
Lord, vouchsafe him light and rest, peace 
and refreshment, joy and consolation iij the 
companionship of saints, in the presence of 
Christ, in the ample folds of Thy great love, 

''Grant that his life (so troubled here) 
may unfold itself in Thy sight, and find a 
sweet employment in the spacious fields of 
eternity. If he hath ever been hurt or 
maimed by any unhappy word or deed of 
mine, I pray Thee of Thy great pity to heal 
and restore him, that he may serve Thee 
without hindrance. 

"Tell him, O gracious Lord, if it may 
be, how much I love him and miss him and 
long to see him again ; and if there be ways 
in which he may come, vouchsafe him to 
me as a guide and guard, and grant me a 
sense of his nearness in such degree as Thy 
laws permit. 

"If in aught I can minister to his peace, 
be pleased of Thy love to let this be, and 
156 



^Tor the Faithful Departed" 

mercifully keep me from every act which 
may deprive me of the sight of him as soon 
as our trial-time is over, or mar the fullness 
of our joy when the end of the days hath 
come. 

"Pardon, O gracious Lord and Father, 
whatsoever is amiss in this my prayer, and 
let Thy will be done; for my will is blind 
and erring, but Thine is able to do exceed- 
ing abundantly above all that we ask or 
think, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen/' 

Dr. Samuel W. Williams — a prominent 
thinker and theologian of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church — writes: ''Our Lord has 
not left the throne where 'He ever liveth 
to make intercession for us/ All souls, 
whether of the quick or dead, are alive in 
His presence. He beholds and knows all 
that are on earth and in the unseen realm 
of Hades. The doctrine of prayers in be- 
half of the dead is older than Christianity; 
157 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

it existed in Judaism. Neither Christ nor 
His apostles seem to have condemned it, 
though they did not enjoin and scarcely 
mentioned it. The early Christian Church 
perpetuated the practice already established, 
and up to the time of the Lutheran Refor- 
mation it was almost universal. Luther re- 
jected it because of its abuse in the sale of 
indulgences and of mortuary masses; for 
there are no supererogatory works. It is 
believed in by both the Roman Catholic 
and Greek Churches, and by some other 
sects. Even where creeds are silent on the 
subject, private Christians accord to it a 
passive or active belief. Many accept it 
who have never uttered prayers for their 
deceased friends, and yet all quietly commit 
them to the mercies of Almighty God. 
There are traces of it in the Book of Com- 
mon Prayer. In our Burial Service the 
efficacy of prayers for the dead is implied. 
Dr. Samuel Johnson prayed for his de- 
158 



^Tor the Faithful Departed" 

ceased wife. On All Souls' Day masses are 
said in Roman Catholic Churches for the 
repose of the dead; and on our memorial 
tablets we inscribe the words, 'May they 
rest in peace !' " 

It is the poet who is most frequently our 
best theologian. He is God's truth-revealer. 
He follows a native instinct, instead of the 
trend of any hard and formal philosophy or 
theology, and looks straight into the heart 
of things. He trusts the primal emotions 
of the race and of his own soul, unfettered 
by sectarian dogmatisms. He interprets 
the universal feelings and latent, ineradi- 
cable beliefs of humanity, putting himself 
into sympathy with the yearnings and 
prayers of his brothers everywhere and 
through all time. He reads the unuttered 
longings of souls — longings too often re- 
pressed by cramping creeds — and his pas- 
sionate and red-blooded words are a tran- 
script of that ineffaceable writing by the 
159 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

finger of God on the tablets of man's funda- 
mental being. It is such a poet who writes 
lines like these : 

"Pray for the dead! Who bids thee not? 
Do all our human loves grow pale, 
Or are the old needs all forgot 
When men have passed within the veil? 

Shall prayer's strong pleadings pierce the skies 
For those we still keep with us here, 

And not a single wish arise 

For loved ones in a happier sphere? 

Pray for the dead, nor dare repress 
Thy longings at the throne of grace ;^ 

Our dead ones are more dear, not less, 
In the pure presence of God's face. 

Love well and pray for all thy dead : 
God gives thee such sweet liberty; 

He means where'er their souls are sped. 
That they shall be in touch with thee/' 



i6o 



CHAPTER IX 

Heaven: Here and Beyond 

Too i^irrtt do we accustom ourselves to 
the thought that heavenly existence is not 
conditioned by time or place — does not nec- 
essarily wait upon death and the opening 
of life without these mortal bodies — does 
not depend upon any ultramundane situ- 
ation or the site of any Celestial City. Es- 
sentially it is an experience in the souls of 
men who have lifted up the doors of their 
spirits to the coming in of the Lord of 
Hosts, who is the King of Glory. In this 
chapter we wish to consider, first, the nature 
of the eiernal life as it manifests itself while 
we are still in the flesh, and to answer the 
question. What and where is the ^'Treasure 
in Heaven" of which the Scriptures speak? 
" i6i 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

and, after that, to notice some ckanged con- 
ceptions as to the nature of the heavenly 
Hfe beyond the grave. 

Once, during a period of illness, Hoff- 
man's picture of the scene between the two 
young men — ^Jesus of Nazareth and the 
nameless Ruler — hung on the walls before 
us and we used to gaze at it every day. 
There was the Christ with the intense 
yearning look in His eyes and His face, 
the gesture of His hands and the whole at- 
titude of His body being one of earnest, 
passionate entreaty and longing love; and 
there was the finely-appareled young Pa- 
trician, with his beautifully classic and 
pensive face half lowered in hesitation and 
inner debate — engaged in a struggle of the 
soul which terminated so unfortunately; 
and, through the open porches and corri- 
dors were to be seen the poor and wretched 
people, the lame, blind, paralytic, poverty- 
stricken, whom Jesus would have the man 
162 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

of affluence notice and let his compassion 
and benefactions flow out spontaneously 
for their help and his own blessing. The 
picture took a strange hold upon us and 
grew in its fascination with every day. It 
seemed pre-eminently a picture for our 
times when men are so tempted to be wed 
to wealth for wealth's sake only, and when, 
like him of old who ''had great posses- 
sions," they have succumbed, perhaps with- 
out their own clear consciousness of it, to 
the fatal and withering sin of avarice. Cer- 
tainly this Biblical incident, with all the sig- 
nificant and searching lessons that it con- 
tains, is one that men ought particularly 
to hear, ponder profoundly, and heed atten- 
tively in an age when mammon is seeking 
to enslave so many hearts. 

But what was the thought of Jesus when, 

demanding a surrender of wealth for the 

sake of the poor and needy. He offered a 

compensation for the sacrifice— ''thou shalt 

163 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

have treasure in heaven?" We know the 
usual answer — treasure laid up in the su- 
persensual world, ''the land that is fairer 
than day;" the delights of Paradise; the 
raptures to be realized after death in the 
bliss of the Celestial City. And we would 
not entirely leave this familiar conception 
out of the count. For, doubtless, the joys 
of the hereafter will be made up largely 
from the reflex action of humane deeds 
done on earth and reappearing in blessed 
memories and reflections — not in an ego- 
tistic and self-congratulatory way, but so as 
to stir a keen thankfulness for the oppor- 
tunity of service — in the minds of the saved 
ones. And this is a treasure which is found 
within — in the secretest recesses of the re- 
joicing soul. It is not external but internal. 
For we must beware of materializing the 
thought of Christ. To Him, evermore, the 
Kingdom of Heaven and its treasures and 
rewards were within. We must not im- 
164 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

agine that the treasure in heaven which He 
offered in the place of earthly riches, freely- 
parted with for the relief of human suffer- 
ing, were simply outward gratifications to 
the spirit organism in the future, answer- 
ing to the stimulations to our mortal senses 
in ravishing beauty for the eyes or intoxi- 
cating sounds for the ear. This "treasure" 
can never consist in palatial surroundings, 
glorious landscapes, seraphic orchestras and 
choirs, rare and subtle perfumes, or such 
fare as angels feast upon. We must find 
our answer elsewhere. Our resurrection 
life must mean the ''standing up'' of the 
soul within us in the full proportions of a 
spiritual manhood — of the full-grown man, 
the measure of the stature of the fullness 
of Christ. 

"Out of the sordid, the base, the untrue. 
Into the noble, the pure, and the new; 
Out of all darkness and sadness and sin 
Spiritual harmonies to win, 
This is our resurrection. 

165 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

Out of the narrow and cramping creeds 
Into a service of loving deeds; 
Out of a separate, limited plan 
Into a brotherhood of man, 
This is our resurrection." 

And may we not see clearly that earthly 
goods, consecrated to God, and given into 
His hands when given to His needy ones, 
earn more than their equivalent in the soul 
even before death and the entrance into the 
unseen world? Is there not in the very 
act of giving, when done with true broth- 
erly sympathy and genuine human interest 
and pity, something which enlarges the 
heart — warms it, upraises it in intercourse 
with God, unites it in bonds of rich com- 
munion with the race, fills it with a joy 
which is unspeakable and abundantly sat- 
isfying? He who has ever once known this 
supreme experience of spiritual delight will 
never forget its indescribable thrill. No 
sensuous pleasures on earth or in the skies 
can ever compare with that deepest and 
i66 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

sweetest soul-sensation. It not only 
brings a precious and delicious ecstasy into 
one's life, but it also ennobles the whole 
being — it adds to the stature of the grander 
self — it makes altogether loftier specimens 
of men and women. And this applies not 
simply to the bestowing of money, but to 
all giving. Many of the world's greatest 
benefactors have not had money to part 
with, but they gave of themselves — their 
labors, time, comforts, sympathies, practical 
helpfulness. And that which they got in 
return, in the rapturous experiences of their 
deepest lives, was truly a treasure in 
heaven. They did not have to wait for it 
for years and in the Beyond. It was imme- 
diate and here. 

More than this: What higher gratifica- 
tion can come to any one than to follow 
even partially the efifect of one's self-denial 
and generosity? To behold the gratitude 
of the suffering ones, to note rejoicingly 
167 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

the Ignorance, poverty, sickness, disease, in- 
firmities, distress, immorality, and spiritual 
destitution a little mitigated — to have the 
sweet consciousness of identifying one's 
self with the larger life of humanity, of los- 
ing one's little selfishness in the greater 
concerns of the race and so broadening to 
the measure of its breadth, of living again 
in lives made better by one's presence — is 
not this essentially and substantially to have 
treasure in heaven? George Eliot unfor- 
tunately lost faith in a personal immor- 
tality beyond death. But her yearning to 
"live again" '4n scorn for miserable aims 
that end in self" was unquenchable. She 
would "make undying music in the world." 
She would dissolve life's discords by let- 
ting them "die in the large and charitable 
air." She is inspired by a noble vision of 
a "better self" that 

". . . shall live till human Time 
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky- 
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb, 
Unread forever." i68 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

And in this very prospect she was en- 
joying a "treasure in heaven." She may 
not have reaHzed it, but the impulse to 
which she gave such eloquent poetic ex- 
pression was an answer to the appeal of 
Jesus : ''Sell that thou hast, and give to the 
poor, and thou shalt have treasure in 
heaven : and come, follow^ Me V' For, in 
the largest meaning of it, to follow Jesus 
and to have treasure in heaven are one 
and the same. For every day that He 
lived He must have been conscious of the 
possession within Him of the heavenly 
treasure as the result of His Divine benefi- 
cence. And, in following Him, we shall 
also possess ourselves in the present of that 
treasure — the treasure of 

*\ . . our rarer, better, truer self, 
That sobbed religiously in yearning song, 
That watched to ease the burden of the world/* 

and that voiced itself in the concluding 

lines of "The Choir Invisible" in this pas- 

169 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

sionate prayer, the answer to which brings 
with it, in its attainment, as real treasure 
in heaven here and now as poets have ever 
sung concerning the "J^^^^alem, the 
Golden'" of the future, ''with milk and 
honey blest" and with "pastures" that are 
"decked in glorious sheen." 

"May I reach 
That purest heaven; be to other souls 
The cup of strength in some great agony; 
Enkindle generous ardor; feed pure love; 
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty — 
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
And in diffusion ever more intense." 

Let us turn our thoughts now to the 
change which has been gradually taking 
place as to the real character of the exist- 
ence of the saints after mortality has been 
swallowed up of life. No one who has 
kept touch with the religious thought 
and feeling of our times can be unaware 
that a silent modification of view, which 
amounts in the end almost to a revolution, 
170 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

has been going on in regard to men's an- 
ticipations of the hereafter. The external 
and spectacular representations of the land 
of our dreams have given way to soberer 
but much more reasonable constructions. 
It is our impression that certain old-time 
hymns about the future life are not being 
sung as much as they once were. It is 
true that we still use songs descriptive of 
heaven — such as ''My heavenly home is 
bright and fair/' "There is a land of pure 
delight," ''Jtvussltm, the Golden," and 
"The Sweet Bye and Bye." But the par- 
ticular strain of longing for heaven seems 
to us to have almost fallen into disuse. 
We formerly loved to sing: 

**0 heaven, sweet heaven, 
Home of the blest; 
How I long to be there. 

All its glories to share, 

And to lean upon Jesus' breast" 

If we ask why the change has come, we 
must assign various reasons : It is felt that 
171 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

this longing for the other world represents 
an isolated mood in the individual soul, 
suitable to be voiced only on particular oc- 
casions, and not a common sentiment in 
which a congregation can join in public 
worship. Hence **I would not live alway" 
is not as popular as it once was. It is felt 
that the rewards for confessing Christ must 
be put in character, and not in promises of 
bliss. Hence the decline of such refrains 
as: 

*'0, you must be a lover of the Lord, 
Or you can't go to heaven when you die." 

And 

"O come and go along with me. 

Where pleasures never die, 
And you shall have a starry crown, 
And dwell above the sky." 

It is felt that there is a certain morbid- 
ness in singing that the pilgrim can ''tarry 
but a night'' in this earth-home of his. It 
is felt that it is an utterly unreal form of 
172 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

religion to put certain sentimental Sunday- 
school songs into the hands of children, 
such as: 

"I long, O I long to be there; 
I long to cross over the river to-night; 
For, O, how I long to be there." 

Paul the aged might possibly say some- 
thing of the sort, but not a bright eight- 
year-old. And it is absurd to keep them 
singing: 

"'T will not be long, our journey here, 
Each broken sigh, each falling tear." 

And who could fail to perceive the false 
sentiment and the altogether inadequate 
and perverted conception of life and its 
meaning in such lines as these? — 

*'Then tempt me not to linger long 
Amid the gay and thoughtless throng; 
For I am only waiting here 
To hear the summons, 'Child, come home!'" 

Then again, this world, with its joys and 
loves, is a fairly good place to live in for 
173 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

most, in these times, and hence we can not 
conscientiously sing, *'The world is very 
evil, the times are waxing late/' as did 
those who were in the midst of persecu- 
tions. More and more the thought obtains 
that God is in His world, and very near at 
hand, so that the soul is satisfied with His 
presence here, without overmuch yearning 
to seek it in the beyond until the summons 
comes. More and more heaven is con- 
ceived as a spiritual kingdom, whose foun- 
dation walls may be laid on earth, as well 
as in "the land that is very far off," and 
whose realities may be experienced in time, 
as in eternity. 

Neither the Scriptures in general nor 
specifically Jesus Himself has given us 
any positive and detailed information as to 
the life beyond the Veil. Evidently the in- 
spired writers and the Master were most 
concerned with the consecrated use of this 
present life, and feared to draw off the 
174 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

thoughts of men to any form of other- 
worldness. But the human imagination 
has busied itself with constructing an ideal 
of heavenly existence. Most of us in mid- 
life can remember when, in the pious fancy 
of most Christians, heaven was described as 
the place 

"Where congregations ne'er break up, 
And Sabbaths have no end" — 

a place where the saved shall walk the 
golden streets, wear crowns, stand before 
the Almighty's rainbow-circled throne to 
wave palms, play on harps, and sing never- 
ending praises throughout all eternity. We 
do not write in any spirit of ridicule and 
have only tried to describe the idea with 
fairness. 

It needs no demonstration to prove that 
that conception has largely lost its attract- 
iveness, and, with the reflecting, has al- 
most passed out of view. That there may 

175 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

be and will be formal worship and praise 
we need not doubt or deny. They will take 
their place, as they do here, among the 
necessary and welcome activities of the 
soul. We gladly concede this while enter- 
taining reasonable doubts that even such 
high exercises will exclusively absorb all 
our time or our powers. Even if we should 
admit that worship is the sole occupation 
of heaven, have we not learned that sing- 
ing hymns does not constitute the whole 
round and sum of worship, but that *'la- 
borare est orare" — to labor is to pray — 
work is worship? And can we conceive 
that the Eternal so delights even in the 
encomiums of His saved ones as to be as 
well-pleased with unceasing musical eulo- 
gies as with doing His will in some active 
labors? Let us say it reverently, but God 
must be better employed than in forever 
sitting upon a throne listening to saintly 
ascriptions to His perfections. He can not 
176 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

be rationally represented as an infinite com- 
placency, nor yet as spending His time thus 
vainly. ''My Father works," said Jesus, 
and it is a poor conception of the All- 
Perfect to represent Him as requiring per- 
ennial and formal laudations before His 
face. To imagine the angels engaged in 
nothing but this is to do them injustice. 
''x\re they not all ministering spirits, sent 
forth to do service for the sake of them 
that shall inherit salvation?'' 

Among the most sensible and reflecting, 
too, there has arisen in their spirits a de- 
mand for a simpler and sweeter life in the 
future, free from the complexity and gar- 
ishness of this. They do not care for pomp 
and splendor, show and ceremonial, palaces 
and multitudes. Rather they say with 
Whittier : 

"No fitting ear is mine to listen 
An endless anthem's rise and fall; 
No curious eye is mine to measure 
The pearl gate and the jasper wall, 

12 177 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

I shrink from unaccustomed glory; 

I dread the myriad- voiced strain; 
Give me the unforgotten faces, 

And let my lost ones speak again." 

And with him all that they crave is 

''Some humble door among Thy many mansions. 
Some sheltering shade where sin and striving 
cease, 
And flows forever through heaven's green ex- 
pansions 
The river of Thy peace." 

Again, the conviction of the continuity 
of all life has forced itself increasingly 
upon us. It is like the seamless robe. We 
no longer picture the other life as a sharp 
and absolute break with this life, but as a 
continuation of it on a higher plane. And 
we no longer describe this earth as "a 
desert drear" and paint the "heavenly 
home" as ''bright and fair" by violent con- 
trast. We have awakened to the beauty 
and nobility of our earth-existence, and 
look forward to the expansion and fruition 
178 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

in the future of every glorious beginning 
here. As a recent writer has said: "The 
prevailing idea of Life Beyond is that it 
corresponds to nothing of which we have 
experience in this life. Some have a vague 
idea of the realm of spirit as a vast, misty 
space, without form, without beauty and 
color, and without objects, save but for 
those bodiless and unattractive souls who 
are supposed to flit about there until the 
time shall come for God to restore them 
to the right to be human once more. That 
which constitutes the real horror of dying 
on the part of many, even Christians, is the 
thought that our conscious, sensitive self 
will then pass into a condition devoid of 
all which characterizes existence here. Let 
a dying one be convinced that Death will 
not transport him to a distant Realm of 
which no knowledge is possessed, but will 
only adapt him more perfectly for a spir- 
itual environment in which he has all along 
179 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

been living; let him but realize that sight 
and sound and mind are intenser realities 
on the other side of the Veil than on this 
side, and the dread of death will vanish. 
There we shall still love; but more exalt- 
edly and purely. There we shall still seek 
after knowledge ; but the horizon of knowl- 
edge will be infinitely expanded. There we 
shall still mingle with our fellows in so- 
cial intercourse; but the class-distinctions, 
the insipidness, the conventionality, and the 
souUessness of much of the social life on 
earth will have disappeared." 

There have come into the thoughts of 
men, too, broader estimates of the true uses 
of life. 'Xife is real, life is earnest." They 
read the Revelation of St. John now, not 
to accept its Oriental imagery literally, but 
to interpret it, as it was meant to be inter- 
preted, in terms of the spirit. They there- 
fore imagine something better for them- 
selves, on emerging into the Unseen, than 
1 80 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

the conventional ideas of the past have 
presented. Such sameness of set devotions 
would breed in them, they feel, surfeit, sa- 
tiety, and a wearisome sense of monotony. 
They rightly imagine that there will be 
some larger use in definite opportunities 
and duties for the expanded powers of 
mind and soul in study and discovery 
among the secrets of God's world. And 
with whatever organism the soul may be 
equipped, there will be something, too, to 
exercise it. While we shall be happily free 
from the over-intense, wearying, nerve- 
racking strain of our present life, still 
Heaven will doubtless furnish us some- 
thing to work at. It will not be a celestial 
lubberland — a paradise of tramps. Who 
could think for a moment that, in any 
sphere, such an energetic personality as our 
President would be content with unending 
days without definite and absorbing labors? 
i8i 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

"Just to lie down and rest — 

And that is all? 
Or, better still, and best, 

To hear a call 
Which none but souls set free 

May understand; 
'The greatest tasks that be 

Await thy hand !' " 

And, in the boundless universe of God, 
will there not be somewhere those whom we 
may help ? Will there not be some call for 
our philanthropic impulses — some satisfy- 
ing joy from self-sacrifice for others — some 
outlet for our sympathies and helpfulness? 
Can we at all fancy that the earth-life of 
Jesus, spent in giving Himself as a ransom 
for others, was but an episode in His eter- 
nal being and that He is not now and for- 
ever engaged in the great work of saving 
His brethren ? And we — is there not a sub- 
lime meaning for us in those words, "And 
His servants shall serve Him?" 

Upon this subject, most tempting to the 
182 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

imagination, a very thoughtful writer, the 
Rev. John C. Jackson, Jr., expresses him- 
self in these words : 

"It is safe to allow people to draw on 
their fancy to any extent they please in 
picturing the future life, for however dif- 
ferent heaven may be from our conceptions, 
we shall find that the half had not been 
told. The problem resolves itself, then, 
into an effort to gain the most reasonable 
and satisfactory conceptions of heaven pos- 
sible to us. In the nature of things, these 
conceptions will change as we ourselves 
change, — as our ideas enlarge, and as spir- 
ituality deepens. Naturally, people's con- 
ceptions will also differ widely, and what 
satisfies one will not satisfy another; and 
as no one knows the absolute truth, we 
shall all have to wait for the everlasting, 
joyous surprise. If heaven's supposed 'per- 
fection' excluded effort and achievement, it 
183 



The Hereafter and Heaveti 

would rob us of one of the purest joys now 
known. That there must be endless pro- 
gression of the finite toward the forever 
unattainable perfections of the Infinite 
seems almost axiomatic. Fixation in even 
ecstasy would be intolerable. Stagnation 
IS not rest. Enforced idleness is one of the 
worst forms of punishment known. If im- 
provement means dissatisfaction with pres- 
ent conditions, it also means pleasure in 
producing better things. Is not this God's 
great law of progression for His creatures 
everywhere ? It would seem that some peo- 
ple's ideas of heaven's perfection is that it 
means geometrical completeness, — like the 
perfection of a circle or a triangle. Moral 
character does not share in such mechan- 
ical existence. I can conceive that even 
Deity Himself experiences increasing joy 
over increasing goodness, and increasing 
love over increasing numbers of creatures 
184 



Heaven: Here and Beyond 

to love. I can not conceive that our per- 
sonality can be preserved without free will 
remaining, or that we can have the power 
to enjoy heaven without corresponding ca- 
pacity to sympathize, which means the 
power to suffer with others. God Himself 
is such a Being. "Like as a father pities his 
children so the Lord pitieth those that fear 
Him." No one would wish ever to lose 
the power of sympathy, but to sympathize 
is to suffer lovingly. If there is joy in 
the presence of the angels over one sinner 
that repenteth, there must be regret when 
they do not repent. In other words, the 
people of heaven must be interested in those 
in this world. If heaven meant a mechan- 
ical completeness of artificial ecstasy and 
inactivity, some of us would prefer to stay 
in this world forever, where we can have 
the supreme joy of suffering and serving 
for the good of others." 
185 



The Hereafter and Heaven 

It was with this sublime conception in 
her mind that Lucy Larcom sang: 

"Not asking rest from toil; — 
Sweet toil that draws us nearer to Thy side; 
Ever to tend Thy planting satisfied, 

Though in ungenial soil. 

But, oh for tireless strength! 
A life untainted by the curse of sin, 
That spreads no vile contagion from within; — 

Found without spot at length! 

For power, and stronger will 
To pour out love from the heart's inmost springs ; 
A constant freshness for all needy things; 

In blessing, blessed still!" 



1 86 



Almighty and Immortal God, the Aid of 
all that need, the Helper of all that flee to 
Thee for Succor, the Life of them that be* 
lieve : 

We intreat Thee, confirm and strengthen 
in us the mighty Hopes and Faiths that clus- 
ter about the Resurrection of Thy Son, 
Jesus Christ, our Lord, the First and the 
Last, the Living One, who in Truth was 
dead, but, behold, is alive unto the Ages of 
Ages, and holds the Keys of Death and the 
Underworld; in whom whosoever believeth 
shall live, though he die, and whosoever liv- 
eth and believeth in Him shall not die eter- 
nally. 

Make us, we beseech Thee, sensitively 
aware of the ever-present Closeness to us 
of this risen Savior in our Perplexity and 
Sinfulness, and cause His Strength and 
Purity to be our Upholding and Sanctiflca- 
tion. May we know, by an inner Conviction, 

187 



Invocation 

that our Redeemer liveth. May we no longer 
live unto ourselves but unto Him who for 
our sakes died and rose again ; and, at last, 
may we attain unto the Resurrection from 
the Dead, and be clothed upon with our Habi- 
tation zvhich is from Heaven. Azvaken us, we 
pray, to an endless Existence in Thy Like- 
ness, and so satisfy us. Let the sublime Ex- 
pectation of Life Everlasting zvith Thee and 
with Christ in Paradise be as an Anchor to 
our souls — a Comfort and Stay in our 
Hours of Depression and Temptation, while 
in this Tabernacle zvherein we groan, being 
burdened. 

Fill us, we implore, with a sacred, in- 
tense, abounding and perennial Joy as we 
look forward zvistfully to an Immortality of 
inexhaustible Blessedness in holy Activities 
and loving Ministrations. Being trans- 
formed daily into the Image of our Lord, 
may zve evermore grow in Grace as zve 
grow in Years, and thus be made meet to be 
Partakers of the Inheritance with the Saints 
in Light. 

As in old Age, zve near the mysterious 
Boundary-line that separates the Seen from 
the Unseen, we pray Thee that our Trust in 
Thy eternal Goodness— the Pledge that Thou 
wilt call and that we shall anszver Thee — 
may become ever more sure, implicit and 
perfect 

i88 



Invocation 

We give Thee hearty Thanks for the good 
Examples of all those Thy Servants, who, 
having finished their Course in Faith, do 
nozv rest from their Labors. Sanctify to us, 
ive humbly ask, the Memories of all the be- 
loved Dead, zvho, having left behind them a 
precious Legacy of noble Characters and 
lofty Deeds, have gone before us into the 
City that hath Foundations — into a better 
Country, that is, a heavenly. Through the 
Mediation of Thy Spirit, may our Remem- 
brance of them incite us to emulate their 
Pietv and Services, and purge us from all 
the Dross of Selfishness and Sin. At times 
may we awake to the vivid Consciousness of 
their Nearness to us to guide, console, and 
cheer; and, in the blending of the old Heart- 
loves, and the mingling of Spirit with Spirit 
in a divine Ecstasy, may we realize the sweet 
Communion of Saints in all its Depth and 
Rapture. And as our departed Friends still 
think dear Thoughts of us, and as we must 
surely believe— pray for us who are yet in 
the Struggles and Sorrows of Earth, so do 
Thou hear our sincere Prayers for them, 
that they may increasingly attain. World 
without End, to fuller Experiences of Holi- 
ness and Happiness, and have their perfect 
Consummation and Bliss, both in Body and 
Soul in Thy eternal and everlasting Glory, 
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. 
189 



MAR 11 1907 



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